JSON5 allows comments.

Can someone explain to me what is so horrible about curly braces that we need a whole host of "human-friendly" configuration languages with nontrivial parsing just to get around them?

▲ ivan_gammel 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We are stuck in the old paradigm of characters taking space on the screen and the idea that a markup language must support classic dumb TUI. If, just imagine it, we used some Unicode range for control characters for the semantic markup and standardized UX for it, we wouldn’t need using normal characters as delimiters and escaping them in strings.

The following would have parseable structure, but would be free of visual noise.

  Title: Markup languages: decades of going in the wrong direction 
  Keywords: hypertext,
      delimiters, 
            ˋ, ", \

	▲	ianburrell 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		People have suggested using the control characters for CSV structured files. The problem is that they are impossible to edit. Control characters are invisible, using them means changing text editors to display them. They are also, outside the usual ones, hard to type. ASCII ones have Ctrl combos, but editors used those for other things. Also, what is the difference between using some new character to start block and "{" or "\n"? Why have new thing to indicate new level when have space and tab?

▲ tracker1 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

    s/JSON/YAML/g
    s/curly braces/whitespace/g

	▲	to11mtm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well in that case, it's all the ways that IDEs like to jank up whitespace, as well as the additional difficulty knowing 'context'. With JSON it's fairly easy for me to know if I want to end my structure as well as the structure containing it, I can just type }}, and add the next element. With whitespace you have to keep track of HOW MUCH whitespace, and trust me once you've got people who are entirely inconsistent with how much whitespace they use it becomes a huge PITA.

▲ wpm 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't ask me, I don't even know what was so bad about XML tags.

	▲	SpaceNoodled 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Probably the verbosity, necessity of a schema for typing, and mixing of text with tags as siblings.

▲ sigmonsays 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I prefer curly braces. My editor has all sorts of comments to jump between opening and closing curly braces. This is not possible with whitespace.

▲ groby_b 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly, nothing. Except the endless debate on where the braces go, and how long they're allowed to stay on a single line.

It seems trivial, but replacing scope delimiters with a per-line signifier (i.e. indent) makes the scope of each line self-contained and sidesteps that discussion.

Is that worth YAYAML (Yet another YAML)? I don't know. But I certainly get the desire to skip the discussion :)

▲

stronglikedan 5 hours ago | parent [-]

But it can't be minified without keeping the line endings and whitespace, unlike JSON.

	▲	groby_b 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You don't need to convince me. The question was "why would people want this", not "why are they wrong to want it" :)