User:Japeq/test

(1) Self-explanatory means that information content of serialized form can be interpreted without having a specification on how the information was serialized. Serialization formats that support associative arrays may have this feature, depending on how the information was encoded.

(2) Means that the serialization format uses ASCII characters and can be viewed in a text editor. Note, if the format uses ASCII control characters but can contain arbitrary binary strings as values, it is only partially human readable.

(3) Canonical means that for each possible serialized structure there is only a single valid serialized form, i.e. there is a bijection between the serialized information and the serialized form. For example, formats that allow arbitrary white space do not satisfy this requirement.