Every format has a story

The lingua franca of the web: data as plain text.

Config format that looks like prose.

Obvious config format for humans and parsers alike.

Fifty years old and still everywhere: spreadsheets as text.

CSV with a tab instead of a comma — built for shells.

The verbose giant that still runs the world's paperwork.

The config format that refused to die.

JSON that finally allows comments.

Java's key=value answer to INI.

Environment variables as a file.

JSON wearing a JavaScript costume.

Formatting you can read as plain text.

The markup that built the web.

The only format every computer understands.

Binary data wearing a text costume.

Base64 without the confusing letters.

Digits and letters, the URL-friendly base.

The densest safe alphabet: 0-9A-Za-z.

Four bytes become five characters.

Binary you can actually read.

Email's way of keeping 7-bit safe.

The 1980s way to mail a binary.

How domains speak Arabic and Cyrillic.

A signed claim you can read (before verifying).

The fingerprint behind half the internet.

The fast hash that should not secure anything.

The checksum that catches cable noise.

Bank accounts with a built-in checksum.

I, II, III, IV — counting like the Romans.

The serial number burned into your NIC.

Three ways to name the same color.

The contact card that predates smartphones.

Calendar invites as plain text since 1998.

Maps as JSON: points, lines, polygons.

Databases exported as INSERT statements.

Unique identifiers without a coordinator.

Lossless pixels, born out of a licensing dispute.

Thirty years of photos in 8×8 blocks.

Google's bet that made the web 30% lighter.

1987 called: it wants to keep animating.

Images as math: resolution-independent forever.

Apple's efficient photo format your computer loves to hate.

The modern image format that crushes JPEG.

The archival format that refuses to compress away.

The uncompressed classic of Windows.

The little file that lives in your browser tab.

ICO's cursor-shaped cousin.

The easiest image format to parse by hand.

The Targa format games grew up on.

The DOS paint format that time forgot.

An image format written in C.

The format that put a thousand songs in your pocket.

Raw sound, zero surprises.

The open-source answer to proprietary audio.

Lossless compression for people who check spectrograms.

Apple's uncompressed studio audio.

Apple's modern, container-smart audio.

The codec that beats them all at low bitrate.

MP3's successor in an MP4 box.

Open, royalty-free sound for the web.

The tiny lossy codec you can read in an afternoon.

Paper, but virtual: documents that look the same everywhere.

Word documents unzipped: XML all the way down.

Spreadsheets as a zip of XML.

PowerPoint presentations are also zip with XML inside.

An e-book as a website in an archive.

Rich Text Format: a document you can read as source.

The archive that ate the world, one PK header at a time.

Tape archive from 1979 that Linux can't live without.

DEFLATE with a header — the web's favorite compression.

Denso Wave's masterpiece that survived its own patents.

The cipher that has hidden spoilers for forty years.

ROT13 for the punctuation crowd.

The cipher that started them all.

The cipher that flips the alphabet.

Dots and dashes that crossed oceans.

A is 1, B is 2, Z is 26.

Hiding words in a’s and b’s.

Knock-knock, spelled in a 5×5 grid.

The 5-bit code that wired the telegraph.

IBM's rival to ASCII.

When Latin letters go square.

The text that appears to glitch.

Hackerspeak where E is 3.

Turn any title into a URL.

Writing Cyrillic with Latin keys.