- Schemaless: The format does not have a knowledge about the underlying data at all.
- Byte-oriented: The format is built upon a byte stream, probably for the ease of implementation and performance.
- Binary: The format is not targeted for human consumption and specified in terms of "bytes" (which is 8 bits long for our purpose).
- Serialization: The format is primarily to be used for storage and transmission, not for the in-memory representation.
- S-Expressions (1997), a "canonical" encoding (which is also used for transport)