[wvenable]

But you have to make it extendable because you can't predict every possible use-case. So some kind of Extensible Markup Language, perhaps.

[ljm]

Maybe we make a sort of 'hyper' extension that comes with all kinds of baked in behaviours, so that we don't have to implement that behaviour ourselves when we deserialise it.

[wvenable]

That's a good idea. Maybe we need a series of standards but all based on some kind of Standard Generalized markup.