From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2003-03-19T13:56:33+09:00
Subject: Re: XML too hard (YAML opportunity?)

jbritt@ruby-doc.org wrote:

> YAML has its place, though personally I haven't had a need for a statically-typed markup language (and I admit I still haven't
> managed to finish reading the spec). But it can't (so far, at least) stand in for XML; comparisons between the two are apples and
> oranges.

What does statically typed mean here?

What I would say (probably out of ignorance) is that XML is semantically 
neutral and YAML is semantically stong. In YAML, it's possible to say 
something about what the symbols of the language represent (this is an 
array, that is a hash, this refers to that, etc.), but in XML you must 
supply that information separately. Of course you still have to do that 
with YAML: if your YAML has a user-defined object, the class of that 
object better be defined when you load. But there's this base layer of 
semantics in YAML that's very close to the way programmers (esp. VHLL 
programmers) think about data. There are other ways of thinking about 
data, so maybe that's where XML can be valuable... Oh, well, it's 
probably been said.