Well, I think YAML is really fantastic…
It’s beautiful, easy to read, clever syntax…compared to any other data serialization format.
As a superset of JSON we could say it’s more elaborated, hence its language evolution.
But I see some different opinions out there, such:
- YAML is dead,
- don’t use yaml and so on…
I simply can’t understand on what this is based because it seems so nice 🙂
If we take few well succeeded examples over the web such as Ruby on Rails, we know they use yaml for simple configuration, but one thing that gets me curious is why yaml is not being part of most used formats over web like XML and JSON.
If you take twitter for example…why not offer the data in YAML format from the API as well?
Is there something wrong by doing it?
We can see the evolution on no-sql databases like couchdb, mongo, all json based, even one great project called jsondb which looks very lightweight and it definitely can do the job.
But when writing data structures in json I really can’t understand why YAML is not being used instead.
So one of my concerns would be if is there something wrong with YAML?
People can say it’s complex, but well, if you pretend to use the same features you would get in json it’s definitely not. You will get a more beautiful file for sure tho and with no hassle. It would be indeed more complex if you decide to use more features, but that’s how things are, at least you have the possibility to use it if you want to.
The possibility to choose if you want or not to use double-quotes for string is fantastic makes everything cleaner and easier to read….well you see what’s my point 🙂
So my question would be, why YAML is not vastly used in place of JSON?
Why it doesn’t seem that it will be used for data structure transfers within the online community?
All I can see is people using it for simple configuration files and nothing else…
Please bear with me since I might be completely wrong and very big projects might be happening and my ignorance on the subject didn’t allow me to be a part of it 🙂
If is there any big project based on yaml out there I would be very happy to know about it
Thanks in advance
It’s not that there’s something wrong with YAML — it’s just that it doesn’t offer any compelling benefits in many cases. YAML is basically a superset of JSON. For most purposes, JSON is quite sufficient — people wouldn’t be using advanced YAML features even if they had a full YAML parser — and its close ties to JavaScript make it fit in well with the technologies that Web developers are using anyway.
TLDR: People are already using as much YAML as they need. In most cases, that’s JSON.