CSVX

Specifications

Introduction

CSVX is designed to be an open data publishing format which is more descriptive than CSV whilst being more tightly targeted at lightweight, tabular data than XML. It grew from a number of projects whereby asynchronous Javascript calls were being used to delta-encode data to and from a server in a web client application. In the application XML serialisation provided a much greater overhead than simply joining strings into a CSV-like format and applying a delta flag (INS,UPD,DEL,etc.).

The initial 1.0 specification eschews much of this advanced functionality in favour of laying the foundation for all future CSVX development. This is specifically targetted at describing the layout of a CSVX document and the basic rules for both parsing and rendering a document.

At the moment no parsing software exists outside of embarrasingly rough alpha stage Javascript and C# object models, however it is expected that such a Class/Model will closely reflect in memory that of the specification whilst essentially presenting the data as either a 2d array of data or a typed collection of rows-of-cells. These are in turn expected to plug-in to the AJAX and Array Javasript function libraries, and similarly licenced in an effort to promote the widespread adoption of CSVX as a standard data exchange format.

Specification Roadmap