Design principles

1. The document is written for people

This is the principle the others follow from. An STXT document must be readable and writable without tools. Hence there are no escape characters, braces, brackets, mandatory quotes or closing tags, and a document looks like an outline.

When a design question arises, this principle is applied to settle it.

2. KISS, simplicity above all

STXT applies the KISS principle (keep it simple) on every plane at once:

• Simple to write and read. There are few rules: indentation, two kinds of node (Name: value or Name >>), optional namespaces and comments. There are no escape characters, lists or shorthand notation.
• Simple to implement. A conforming parser is a line-by-line pass with a stack. Schemas and validation are separate, optional layers.

3. Safety from the design

STXT applies safety in the design decisions themselves and not as a later add-on. Hence, for example, the absence of features or the restriction of namespace characters to alphanumeric ASCII.