Data Formats#
Wire and config plumbing, plus the markup and styling formats that share the same parsing-and-emitting workflow. JSON for an API response, YAML for a config, Parquet on disk in an analysis estate, HTML for a phished page, CSS for the theme on top. Reading and writing these on the way to and from a target is a unit-level skill.
These are not programming languages (no control flow, no execution), but identifying a format on sight and parsing it at the command line moves the work forward on every job.
Data#
Structured serialisation. Wire payloads, configs, columnar storage.
The format parsed on every collection. REST APIs, audit logs, telemetry, manifests.
Human-friendly serialisation. Indentation, comments, anchors. Every JSON document is also valid YAML.
Modern config format with a real spec. pyproject.toml,
Cargo.toml. Typed values, dates first-class,
explicit sections.
The longest-living config format. No standard; many
dialects (configparser, systemd, Git config,
my.cnf, pip.conf, php.ini).
The older sibling of JSON. Schemas, XPath, XSLT. Embedded in finance, healthcare, document formats.
Comma-Separated Values. The simplest tabular format and the one that outlives most replacements.
Tab-Separated Values. The underrated cousin of CSV; the tab almost never appears inside real data.
Google’s compact binary serialisation. Schema-backed, typed bytes; not human-readable.
Columnar binary format for analytical workloads. The storage format under nearly every data lake.
Binary container for large, heterogeneous numerical datasets.
Specification document (YAML or JSON) describing HTTP APIs. Endpoints, request and response schemas, auth.
Markup#
Tags around content. The document and web layer.
The document format of the web. Living standard maintained by WHATWG.
Styling#
Presentation rules layered on top of markup.
How HTML looks. Layout, animation, theming, selection.
CSS preprocessor with CSS-superset syntax. Variables, nesting, mixins, modules.
CSS preprocessor with variables, nesting, mixins, functions. Compiles to plain CSS.