I've seen it used even more generally for any `A -> B` (or `A -> Option<B>`) where B could be faithfully decoded back to A. In my head, serialization is a spec

I've seen it used even more generally for any `A -> B` (or `A -> Option<B>`) where B could be faithfully decoded back to A. In my head, serialization is a special case of encoding when B is some type of string. In this case it's YAML. I could probably have worded my previous comment more precisely.