If XHTML is all good and Textile/RST/Pandoc is all bad, then YAML is half bad. Like Textile and its ilk, I can’t easily write YAML without tools. But the good thing is that if I am looking at a YAML document, I can more or less understand the gist of what’s there.
@Sandra There's the sensible little core of YAML which is great. And I use it simply because it's easy for me to write by hand when I'm putting together a config file or whatever, much more so than JSON, while preserving the deep structure I want. But then there's the Norway problem, the anchors/aliases, in general the lack of type support, the way parsers will casually execute code named in the file… some day I may write a "mini YAML" which adds type support and sets but dumps all the stuff I never use or want used.
Note that NO is no longer a boolean literal in YAML 1.2 (which came out in 2009) so Norway hasn’t been a good example for almost 15 years. The two remaining strings to watch out for is true and false. I’m not sure I agree with this decision; since I was resigned to the idea that I can’t eyeball a YAML document’s validity and bug-free-ness, and that’s a pretty huge downside to a document format but the upside is how human-friendly it read.
has-paid: no
delivered: yes
Nice! But no longer possible in the current version.
@Sandra If strings had to be quoted I'd be happy with lots of alternative booleans because they wouldn't trip me up unexpectedly. (And it would let me say "the string '34', not the number 34".)
I’m still not at a level where I feel comfortable with the YAML I make without linters or parse dry runs or Emacs modes although I’m getting more and more comfy with it.
But if all strings had to be quoted, it’d lose its human readable appeal. Might as well use JSON at that point (and many do, since JSON is more used than YAML or at least that’d be my guess).
@Sandra I just find JSON ugly. But tbh I'll probably use that (in its expanded form so that it's on multiple lines) before I go to the trouble of building a new data structuring language.
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