Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions
Standard Architecture for Universal Comment Extensions or SAUCE, as it is most commonly known, is an open metadata protocol for tagging and describing ASCII text files and other files, most of which generally center around or date back to the era of BBSing. SAUCE is very similar in nature to an MP3 ID3 tag created in 1996 in that it carries metadata such as the title, author (artist), organization (group), as well as specific hierarchical datatype information depending on what type of file it is describing.
The SAUCE protocol was invented and developed by the Belgian programmer known by the pseudonym Tasmaniac of ACiD in 1994, two years before ID3 was established, who later went on to create the XBin image format. The first utility created to add SAUCE descriptions to files was named SPOON.