tson.io

Revision 34Current working draft·All revisions

Specification

The TSON specification, split into two parts, plus the companion documents developed alongside it. Spot an error, or have a comment on the specification? Open an issue on GitHub.

TSON Specification

  • TSON Part 1: Text Data Format
    Draft 2026·Working Draft·view raw ↗

    The notation and reference encoding of the TSON schema system: the lexer, structural grammar, absent sentinel, augmentation syntax (annotations, type annotations, directives), and base type resolution — everything needed to losslessly read and write schemaless TSON data.

  • TSON Part 2: Type System and Schema
    Draft 2026·Working Draft·view raw ↗

    The centre of the TSON series: the schema grammar, the type system and its operations, the schema chain and its resolution model, schema compilation and resolver output, the text encoding rules, and the operations of the schema, meta, and import directives.

  • TSON Developer Guide
    Draft 2026·Working Draft·view raw ↗

    Rationale, extended examples, and implementation guidance for the TSON specification series. Nothing in this guide is normative; where it appears to disagree with [TSON-DATA] or [TSON-SCHEMA], the specifications govern.

Schema Source Files

The normative TSON schema source files in .tnformat, each followed in parentheses by its non-normative resolved-output fixture. To check an implementation: parse the source, run the resolver, canonicalise, and compare against the fixture.

Reports

The working documents belonging to this revision: the change log of what was accepted into it, and the non-normative reports written against it, which record findings and design directions under consideration rather than committed specification.

  • TSON 2026 Revision 34 — Change Log
    Against TSON 2026 Revision 33 (Working Draft)·view raw ↗

    Adjudicated and executed 2026-08-29 — Part 1, Part 2, and all six companion artifacts updated; hash pins recomputed over the shipped bytes

    • SPEC-FEEDBACK.md (17 entries, against Revision 33)
    • Revised companion artifacts: meta-kernel.tn, meta.tn, core.tn and resolved fixtures (implementing #3 step 1, #5, #7, #12)

Implementations of TSON (parsers, encoders, libraries) may be licensed however you choose; the specification's license applies to the written text, not to code that implements it.