Submission + - Fear and Loathing in YAML (chrisshort.net) 1
oaf357 writes: Remember, comparing things relatively to like something (YAML vs. XML or YAML vs. JSON) completely throws out the beginner’s journey. Start from the newb and go forward from there. YAML doesn’t. Git doesn’t. Incrementally, YAML is better than XML but, it sucks compared to something like HTML or Markdown (which I can teach to execs and children alike). Yes, balancing machine and human readability is hard. The compromises suck, but, at some point, there’s enough compute to run a process to take in something 100% human-readable and make it 100% machine-readable. In the same sense that compute has become so readily available that we gzip and encrypt almost all HTTP traffic today, I hope we can do the same with systems configuration languages. Move the complexity from the human to code. Computers are better at remembering things and syntax-semantics than humans could ever hope to be.
Binary markup or GTFO. (Score:2)
UTF8 is already binary. Hell, ASCII is already binary numbers, not directly readable, but mapped to vector drawings or bitmap images ... that again are rendered to pixel values, that are then turning on blinkenlights or ink blots or noises that a human can actually recognize directly.
So why not extend it to structure, instead of just letters (... and colors ... and sound pressures...)
EBML's core is the logicl choice.
If all editors always display it as, say XML, just like they all convert numbers into text-s