Table of Contents Introduction Objectives It should be more lightweight than XML and/or JSON It should be fully self contained It should be technology agnostic It should be serializable and deserializable It should be easily converted to and from XML and JSON

Transmute is a new file format that is meant to be an alternative to JSON or XML.

The transmute file is broken down into a number of segments

 * Header Segment
 * Data Segment
 * Footer Segment

When you're paying by the MB then really every byte counts so the idea of this format is to save on network bandwidth to reduce the cost of bandwidth used on mobile devices or those with otherwise slow internet connections.

The format should have everything you need in it for the format to make sense, you shouldn't therefore need a separate file defining the schema it is going to use. This differentiates it from other formats such as EXI

There will initially of course be libraries for one specific language but the underlying format should be generic and therefore it should be easily portable to another language or technology.

The format should be easily and efficiently serialized and deserialized in the same way that JSON and XML are. You shouldn't have to first convert to another format.

The format should be generic enough that it can be easily converted to and from XML and JSON. The idea being that you can convert from one format to another