Nue's simplicity is great! But then why YAML over JSON?

[elimisteve]

Is your feature request or improvement related to a problem?

The problem of complexity, yes! YAML is not like JSON, it's a complexity disaster: https://noyaml.com/ .

Solution you'd like

How about using site.json instead of site.yaml? Same for blog/blog.yaml, etc; let's use .json files, not .yaml.

Alternatives you've considered

.toml might be a decent choice! It'd be great for simple config, but once you need to nest data structures a bit (like simple-blog's site.yaml does with navigation.header and navigation.footer), it seems like JSON would be a better fit.

Additional context

Seriously, check out https://noyaml.com/ ! FYI the YAML spec is 5-10x the size of the JSON spec. Given the brilliant simplicity of Nue, it deserves so much better than YAML!

[nobkd]

I personally think yaml is much easier to write and read, but that's just my opinion. AFAIK yaml is a superset of json, so you could probably just write json in there, if you wanted to..

[tipiirai]

Shortly: YAML is for humans, JSON for machines. And many of the issues listed on your link (like the Norway problem) no longer exist — at least on the js-yaml implementation we use. If something, we could think of implementing our custom YAML parser without any of the listed problems. I feel JSON would make Nue configuration more complex, not simpler.

[tipiirai]

I agree that Nue deservers something better than the current YAML specification — particularly because Nue gets unwarranted bad rap because of that choice. For that reason I have seriously thought about writing a YAML parser, which only takes the good parts of it and addresses the issues listed in noyaml.com. Should be quite small/straightforward project. Does anyone want to help here?

[AIABHISHEK]

I agree that Nue deservers something better than the current YAML specification — particularly because Nue gets unwarranted bad rap because of that choice. For that reason I have seriously thought about writing a YAML parser, which only takes the good parts of it and addresses the issues listed in noyaml.com. Should be quite small/straightforward project. Does anyone want to help here?

I guess that would be best thing would love help

[chan27-2]

this sounds like a super interesting idea can i jump in too

[elimisteve]

@AIABHISHEK @chan27-2 I asked Claude to write a parser to parse the specific subset of YAML it seems Nue uses. Here's what it came up with: https://claude.ai/share/b7e555e6-1628-4feb-8634-6cd6364aa2ae

[tipiirai]

Glad to see excitement around this!

For the syntax I primarly wish flexible string handling:

1. Never require string values to be quoted. You could write my_string: Foo : Bar "baz" and 'whatever' without issues
2. Same with any nested items. globals: [ @global ] would not need quotes

The above would remove all my personal glitches with YAML. I don't really have any other complaitnts about YAML — I actually like it. For the project itself, I'd like to see minimalistic source code. Claude gave a a good starting point, but there's always room for improvement. The code should follow our rules and perhaps the most important: a super broad test suite would be awesome where one could see how the syntax works.