Editing Serialization (section)

==Serialization formats==
{{Main|Comparison of data serialization formats}}
The [[Xerox Network Systems]] Courier technology in the early 1980s influenced the first widely adopted standard. [[Sun Microsystems]] published the [[External Data Representation]] (XDR) in 1987.<ref>{{cite journal |title= XDR: External Data Representation Standard |author= Sun Microsystems |journal= RFC 1014 |year= 1987 |publisher=Network Working Group |url= http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1014 |access-date= July 11, 2011 }}</ref> XDR is an [[open format]], and standardized as [https://tools.ietf.org/html/std67 STD 67] (RFC 4506) by [[Internet Standard|IETF]].

In the late 1990s, a push to provide an alternative to the standard serialization protocols started: [[XML]], an [[SGML]] subset, was used to produce a human-readable [[binary-to-text encoding|text-based encoding]]. Such an encoding can be useful for persistent objects that may be read and understood by humans or communicated to other systems regardless of programming language. It has the disadvantage of losing the more compact, byte-stream-based encoding, but by this point larger storage and transmission capacities made file size less of a concern than in the early days of computing. In the 2000s, XML was often used for asynchronous transfer of structured data between client and server in [[Ajax (programming)|Ajax]] web applications. XML is an open format and standardized as a W3C recommendation.

[[JSON]] is a lightweight plain-text alternative to XML and is also commonly used for client-server communication in web applications. JSON is based on [[JavaScript syntax]] but is independent of JavaScript and supported in many other programming languages. JSON is standardized as [https://tools.ietf.org/html/std90 STD 90] ({{IETF RFC|8259}}), [http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-404.pdf ECMA-404], and [https://www.iso.org/standard/71616.html ISO/IEC 21778:2017].

[[YAML]] is a strict superset of JSON and includes additional features such as a data type tags, support for cyclic data structures, indentation-sensitive syntax, and multiple forms of scalar data quoting. YAML is an open format.

[[Property list]]s are used for serialization by [[NeXTSTEP]], [[GNUstep]], [[macOS]], and [[iOS]] [[Software framework|frameworks]]. ''Property list'', or ''p-list'' for short, doesn't refer to a single serialization format but instead several different variants, some human-readable and one binary.

For large volume scientific datasets, such as satellite data and output of numerical climate, weather, or ocean models, specific binary serialization standards have been developed, e.g. [[Hierarchical Data Format|HDF]], [[netCDF]] and the older [[GRIB]].