[maweki]

We found yaml to be a great exchange format for electronic exam data. It allows us to put student submitted answers and source code into a yaml file and there is no weird escaping. It's very readable with a text editor. And then we just add notes and a score as a list below and then there's the next submission.

For readability of large blocks of texts that may or may not contain various special characters and newlines the only other alternative we have seen was XML, but that is very verbose.

So what the author finds as a negative, the many string formats, are exactly what drew us to yaml in the first place.

[dreamcompiler]

Somebody in these discussions always correctly points out that s-expressions are as expressive as XML but without the excess line noise, so it might as well be me.

[privatelypublic]

What is so verbose about a cdata directive? Everybody complains about XML being verbose, never once heard complains about HTML being too verbose.

[tpmoney]

I’ll be that person then. HTML is too verbose for anything intended to be read as plaintext (and not the parsed marked up form) more than 25% of the time. A well formatted java doc comment full of HTML markup is difficult to read as plaintext, but without the markup loses out on the expressiveness converting javadoc to html can give. That’s why it’s nice that Java 25 will introduce markdown as a new option for javadoc (and presumably why Rust chose it for the same)