The numerous, proprietary file formats for Scanning Probe Microscopy (SPM) have caused problems in the field of both off‐line quantitative, data analysis and comparison, as well as long‐term archiving of measurement results. Because of the eminent roll SPM’s are playing in the multidisciplinary scientific world of today, an open, XML‐based, standard SPM data format, called Scanning Probe Microscopy Markup Language (SPML) is proposed. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) has proven to be well applicable for standardized, structured, scientific data formats in many other disciplines. The structure of SPML will be explained briefly. The versatility of SPML as well as the possibilities of documenting, publishing, searching and exchanging SPM‐data will be shown in examples. This paper gives an overview of the proposed data format, while the complete description can be found athttp://spml.net. © 2003 American Institute of Physics