Use Self-Describing Data
Use self-describing data to exchange information whenever possible. Self-describing data contains not only the values of interest to the program, but also descriptive names and type indicators. Rendezvous software uses its universal wire format for self-describing data to insulate your programs from the data representation differences across hardware and operating system platforms.
Several packages are available for managing self-describing data. Some implement industry standards such as XML, X.409, IDL or ASN.1. Others, like Rich Text Format (RTF) meet special needs of an industry or software tool. If your company or group has adopted one of these packages or standards, you can use it with Rendezvous software by packaging the data as opaque bytes (see TIBRVMSG_OPAQUE at Rendezvous Datatypes).
Like Rendezvous software, most of those packages include functions that map data between the formats used inside your program and a normalized format for network interchange—handling the details of format conversion, alignment and structure.