this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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Some data formats are easy for humans to read but difficult for computers to efficiently parse. Others, like packed binary data, are dead simple for computers to parse but borderline impossible for a human to read.
XML bucks this trend and bravely proves that data formats do not have to be one or the other by somehow managing to be bad at both.
Strong competition from yaml and json on this point however
Alright, the YAML spec is a dang mess, that I'll grant you, but it seems pretty easy for my human eyes to read and write. As for JSON -- seriously? That's probably the easiest to parse human-readable structured data format there is!
it is anything but easy to read if your entire file does not fit on a single screen.
What data format is easy to read if it fills more than the entire screen?
what kind of config file is short enough to fit on a single screen with line breaks?
Why?