See also: External textual DSLs.

This note is a list of all external DSLs (human-editable yet computer-readable textual files) that I know of. For a textual file format to be included in this list, it needs to meet the following requirements:

• A file in this format can be reasonably expected to be edited by a human.
• It needs nothing but a text editor to edit.
• It needs to be difficult to introduce errors.
• It is not based on another file format (this rules out formats based on XML).

List

Note that this list is incomplete and will always be incomplete. Suggestions are welcome.

Audio

• CUE
• M3U
• PLS

Diagramming

• DOT
• PlantUML

Financial

• beancount
• Ledger
• Hledger

Graphics

• PLY (Polygon File Format)
• POV-Ray file format
• STLA (ASCII stereolithography)

Text

• AsciiDoc
• D★Mark
• Fountain (screenplays)
• Markdown
• Markua
• org-mode
• ReStructuredText
• roff/troff/…
• Scroll
• TeX
• Texinfo

Music

• abc notation

Programming languages

The vast majority of programming languages fits in here. (No-code environments do not, though.)

Semantic web

• n-triples
• n-quads
• notation3
• turtle

Software delivery

• Brewfile

Structured data

• HCL
• INI
• JSON
• KDL
• NestedText
• Pkl
• RCL
• SDLang
• S-expressions
• TOML
• XML
• YAML

Styling

• CSS
• DSSSL

Tabular data

• CSV
• TSV

Video

• SRT (subtitles)
• SUB (subtitles)

Other (uncategorised)

• BibTeX
• Metafont
• Metapost
• Serifu, a markup language for composing comic book scripts