this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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If yaml didn’t have anchors and 8 different white space formats, it’d be a great replacement for this kind of thing.
But yaml is a mess, and you’d think you could parse it easily, but you can’t.
YAML is redeemed by one thing only:
All JSON is valid YAML.
No way. You're telling me I can just write json instead?
Yup! YAML is defined as a "strict superset" of JSON (or at least, it was the last time I checked).
It's a lot like markdown and HTML; when you want to write something deeply structured and somewhat complex you can always drop back/down to the format with explicit closing delimiters and it just works™.
I found out the hard way this is not entirely correct, as a user found a valid json that yaml parsers didn't handle. IIRC it was some exotic whitespace issue
Yes, in true YAML fashion, there are some edge cases where things act weird but are technically correct.
As someone who works with YAML regularly:
Fuck YAML.
As someone who runs Home Assistant:
Fuck YAML.
Nah, yaml isn't great by virtue of itself but with what it competes with. I far, far prefer it to any other BS. Json is garbage for human creation and obviously toml due to above. XML... Obviously just for machines.
Again, only good because of its competition.
I prefer writing JSON by hand. The whitespace stuff in YAML is just such a nuisance as far as I'm concerned, which is odd as I have no problem with it in Python.
I want to like yaml, I really do, but why are there so many different ways of specifying the same thing?
Is there a reason? Norway!
I have a fundamental disdain for formats with restrictive white space definitions (I’m looking too at you Python)
I’ve never had this issue with Python, but makefile has given me plenty of whitespace issues.
Should have added if it cares about tabs vs spaces.
The author knew it was a bad idea
But my vertical tabs!
import yaml:)I'm a fan of NestedText. It's no panacea but I'd argue it's the most well-considered and useful file format for structured data in plain text.
There just needs to be one universal standard that handles everyone’s use cases
No, for multiple standards that handle their usecase good.
https://xkcd.com/927/