The IUCr Committee for the Maintenance of the CIF Standard (COMCIFS) held a Workshop and Symposium as satellites of the 28th European Crystallographic Meeting in summer 2013. The Workshop took delivery of DDLm, the next-generation dictionary definition language with methods, and investigated approaches to CIF dictionary authoring. The Symposium was designed to celebrate and develop the role of the CIF information exchange standard over the previous two decades. 15 enthusiastic and compelling speakers explained how crystallography, particularly in its application to structure determination, is a field with supremely well developed practices in the collection, analysis, interpretation, publication and archiving of raw and processed data, and the structural information derived from diffraction experiments. These practices are so well ingrained that many crystallographers are unaware of how well we do these things, compared with other scientific fields. The Symposium reminded the crystallographic community of its great track record in data handling, and also anticipated further advances in data management, integration, validation and curation.