I came in here to rant that YAML isn't for the same purpose as JSON and XML but then thought I'd better RTFA and realised that oh yeah one or two good points he

I came in here to rant that YAML isn't for the same purpose as JSON and XML but then thought I'd better RTFA and realised that oh yeah one or two good points here. The first criticism, where he's embedding exectutable code in YAML I kind of have to agree with - that seems crazy. I don't know why YAML would support this. The remaining criticisms seem to relate to (a) the spec overreaching in terms of complexity and (b) differences in implementation, which I guess is some kind of an extension of (a). I maintain however that YAML, JSON and XML are different. If you want to make me feel cross and insulted give me a JSON file to edit. I think JSON is probably the best commonly used format for M2M and storage serialisation. I wouldn't want you to use YAML for that though. There's two many different ways to do it and any kind of ambiguity never makes for good M2M. For configuration-files it's great though, as long as you stay away from some of the more exotic features I suppose. It effectively provides a "user interface" of sorts by which your users can specify non-trivial configuration details. The complaints about overlong and overcomplex yaml files could be extended to other commonly used formats. With regards to XML, I'd say that YAML provides all the features you'd want to use from that format in a format that's easier to hand-edit as text. XML is "okay" for M2M but probably better for document storage where you have some kind of custom editor. It's horses for courses. I wouldn't want to use YAML where I'd want to use JSON, or use XML where I'd use either of them, and neither of these have the semantic richness of XML either and so wouldn't be appropriate in whatever spaces XML should be used (which is far more limited I suspect than its current span of applications). Ultimately when each is used to its strengths they're not interchangeable formats.