Name–value pair

In such situations, all or part of the data model may be expressed as a collection of 2-tuples in the form with each element being an attribute–value pair.

Depending on the particular application and the implementation chosen by programmers, attribute names may or may not be unique.

As a result, they are not fully general; they cannot be used, for example, to implement electronic mail headers (which are ordered and non-unique).

Some data serialization formats such as JSON support arbitrarily deep nesting.

[2] Other data representations are restricted to one level of nesting, such as INI file's section/name/value.

Example of a web form with name-value pairs