What YAML engine do you use?

[Daniel Bickett]

Doug Holton wrote:
> What do you expect?  YAML is designed for humans to use, XML is not.
> YAML also hasn't had the backing and huge community behind it like XML.
> XML sucks for people to have to write in, but is straightforward to
> parse.  The consequence is hordes of invalid XML files, leading to
> necessary hacks like the mark pilgrim's universal rss parser.  YAML
> flips the problem around, making it harder perhaps to implement a
> universal parser, but better for the end-user who has to actually use
> it.  More people need to work on improving the YAML spec and
> implementing better YAML parsers.  We've got too many XML parsers as it is.

However, one of the main reasons that XML is so successful is because
it's roots are shared by (or, perhaps, in) a markup language that a
vast majority of the Internet community knows: HTML.

In it's most basic form, I don't care what anyone says, XML is VERY
straight forward. Throughout the entire concept of XML (again, in its
most basic form) the idea of opening and closing tags (with the
exception of the standalone tags, however still very simple) is
constant, for all different data types.

In my (brief) experience with YAML, it seemed like there were several
different ways of doing things, and I saw this as one of it's failures
(since we're all comparing it to XML). However I maintain, in spite of
all of that, that it can easily boil down to the fact that, for
someone who knows the most minuscule amount of HTML (a very easy thing
to do, not to mention most people have a tiny bit of experience to
boot), the transition to XML is painless. YAML, however, is a brand
new format with brand new semantics.

As for the human read-and-write-ability, I don't know about you, but I
have no trouble whatsoever reading and writing XML. But alas, I don't
need to. Long live elementtree (once again) :-)

Daniel Bickett