Format descriptions

Serialization formats start from data in your program and define their own bytes. A format description goes the other way: it starts from bytes that already exist, such as a GIF, a ZIP archive, an ELF binary or a device protocol, and describes them as they are. Kaitai Struct writes these descriptions in YAML and compiles them into parsers for a dozen programming languages.

So these tools show up in reverse engineering, digital forensics and digital preservation rather than in data pipelines.