Records

This is the part that is not Markdown with extra steps.

The shape

A block whose payload is Key: value lines:

@task
Title: Ship the reference parser
Status: In Progress
Owner: Subbu
Due: 2026-08-15
@endtask

Rendered as a card:

task

Title: Ship the reference parser
Status: In Progress
Owner: Subbu
Due: 2026-08-15

And returned by xtxt extract as data:

{"title": "Ship the reference parser", "status": "In Progress",
 "owner": "Subbu", "due": "2026-08-15", "done": false, "line": 3}

Why this matters

Consider the same information in Markdown:

We're currently working on shipping the reference parser — Subbu
is on it, should be done by the 15th.

Everything a program needs is there, and none of it is reachable. Extracting it means writing a parser for English and being wrong sometimes. The XTXT version is not better prose; it is prose plus a declaration.

The standard types

Type	For
`@task`	A unit of work
`@decision`	A choice and its reasoning
`@knowledge`	A fact worth keeping
`@note`	An aside or admonition
`@ai`	Model output kept with its context
`@prompt`	A prompt worth reusing
`@chat`	A conversation turn

None of these is special to the parser. They are named in the specification so that independent tools agree on the common cases.

Inventing your own

@experiment
Hypothesis: attention improves recall on long inputs
Dataset: wikitext-103
Result: confirmed, +4.2 points
@endexperiment

That works with no parser change and no registration. A reader that does not know @experiment still returns its fields, because the format guarantees the shape is preserved and reported.

Field names mean nothing to the format

XTXT guarantees that Priority: High is a field named Priority with the value High, in that position. What Priority means is your application's business.

That is the same bargain HTML made with class names, and it is why a new record type works without anyone updating a parser.

note

Title: The honest cost Nothing declares that Status is an enum, or that Due is a date. Two authors can produce two vocabularies that do not line up, and a program consuming both has to reconcile them itself. Schemas are the most requested missing feature and are covered on the Limitations page.

Multi-line values and body text

A line without a colon is kept as part of the block's payload text, so a record can carry prose as well as fields:

@decision
Title: Unknown directives are warnings, never errors
Why: A reader from today must stay useful on a document written tomorrow.
@enddecision

Checklists are records too

- [ ] items are returned by extract as tasks alongside @task blocks, so a throwaway checklist and a formal record both reach a program without you having to choose upfront.