The HSD-format is very similar to both JSON and YAML, but tries to minimize the effort for humans to read and write it. It ommits special characters as much as possible (in contrast to JSON) and is not indentation dependent (in contrast to YAML). It was developed originally as the input format for the scientific simulation tool (DFTB+ https://github.com/dftbplus/dftbplus), but is of general purpose. Data stored in HSD can be easily mapped to a subset of JSON or XML and vica versa.