yaml, an alternative for XML

yaml is an serialization data language, an alternative to the markup language of XML. And I think is pretty cool their use it, because really is more readable than XML. It’s focus on the simplicity. Let’s go to an example took from the reality, this is how an NHibernate mapping file should look with the yaml format:

If you use NHibernate, you know, this is too much easy to read. As you see the delimitation is made for the indentation, if you know something about languages like Python this is very familiar. Of course, this is not provided, but who knows, maybe someone want to donate some hours to the OSS and make it

Maybe a notorious disadvantage is that yaml don’t have schema. And you can guess the missing features because of that, the most important is the yaml-validation.

In the .Net world is not so popular, but in languages like Python, Php, Perl, C++ is well used. In the brand new baby of Google: Google App Engine, which the main language of the core is Python (actually right now is the only one supported) uses yaml of data definition.