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Comment by tipiirai | Hacker News Reader

I think YAML is a good pick for non-developers / content creators. The front matter section in Markdown files is a good example. Or is there a better, human-friendly alternative?

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You just pinpointed my biggest peeve with YAML. It looks like it's "human friendly" because there are no scary curly braces. But you still need to get the syntax exactly right, so that benefit is very small. And now you have to keep your finger on the screen while scrolling in order to figure out what a bullet belongs to.

Then what alternative do you recommend for content creators? Do you use the alternative in Markdown front matter?

I don't think they have a need for configuration files while filming their tiktoks.

What is the best term to use for the people who are writing content on the web team? The ones who write blog entries, documentation, and marketing pages. The ones who mainly touch Markdown files.

TOML is pretty easy to grok and forgiving at the same time

Learn JavaScript. Get the fuck out of your "content creator" pigeonhole. JavaScript is content.

I don't think anyone writes their blog entries with JavaScript here.

You should make what you do / don't do less of your identity. You're limiting yourself because you identify as "not the kind of person who does that".

Note that I am not a content creator myself. I build solutions for web teams and on those teams, some people focus solely on content and Markdown. I want to offer them an easy editing experience. So far YAML has been the easiest format for them.

This is least of my worries - just use VScode with plugin which gives red lines on and formats yaml, use yamllint in your CI.

Basically you're saying YAML is unreadable without an IDE or a text editor with advanced highlighting functionality.

> But you still need to get the syntax exactly right

I think it's more that it's declarative that makes it simple. Also you just have to remember simpler rules compared to JSON.

E.g.

  - Apple
  - Orange
  - Strawberry
  - Mango

Is simpler than

  [
    "Apple",
    "Orange",
    "Strawberry",
    "Mango"
  ]

Don't forget to skip that last comma! But not all of the others!

>I think it's more that it's declarative that makes it simple

..it's no more or less declarative than other configuration languages?

And yes, I get that it looks simpler. I just think that it applies as long as your file can fit in about half a page. As it grows and becomes deeply nested, IMO, that simplicity disappears.

YAML is all but human-friendly. It has far too many special features and edge cases for most people. Something simple like Java properties files would solve something like markdown front matter perfectly fine.

Java properties files are a mess. They still require Windows encoding (ISO-8859-1), which is incompatible with UTF-8.

Only if you're still using java 8.

That's a common misconception.

Look at the documentation [0] or at the OpenJDK code. Both assume ISO-8859-1, unless you're dealing with a special case where resource bundles are involved.

[0]: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/21/docs/api/java.base...

ISO-8859-1 is Latin-1, there's nothing specifically "Windows" about it.

You're correct.

You were probably thinking of Windows-1252, which is an extension of ISO-8859-1 that supports more European character sets.

I'd personally go with TOML over YAML for that

Why something so complex for front matter? Isn't it typically just a few key/value pairs?

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