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Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

leebriggs.co.uk

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Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#131

Post by kevincox »

neallindsay wrote: post #120

My personal philosophy is that string interpolation should not be used to generate machine-readable code, and template languages are just fancy string interpolation. We've all seen the consequences of SQL injection and cross-site scripting. That's the kind of thing that will keep happening as long as we keep putting arbitrary text into interpreters. Yes, this means I don't think we should use template files to make H…

This is the essence of the problem! Yaml and templates are just distractions. It just boils down to the fact that "string" is a very general type and we use it lazily.

My personal rule: Every time a value is inserted into a string it must be properly encoded.

I wrote a full blog post around this a while back https://kevincox.ca/2022/02/08/escape-everything/. But the TL;DR is that every string has a format which needs to be respected wether that be HTML, SQL or human-readable terminal output. Every time you put some value into a string you should be properly encoding it into that format. But we rarely do.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#132

Post by Brian_K_White »

chx wrote: post #111
bayindirh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TOML is just an .ini file plus some syntactic and computing sugar. I can argue that TOML is actually way older than it is.

1. I am unaware of a standardized .ini format 2. The native types in TOML are useful.

Shall we bet on what would happen if we asked 10 random people of any IT stripe to write a small sample INI file?

Come on.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#134

Post by Zambyte »

tipiirai wrote: post #32
kristiandupont wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You just pinpointed my biggest peeve with YAML. It looks like it's "human friendly" because there are no scary curly braces. But you still need to get the syntax exactly right, so that benefit is very small. And now you have to keep your finger on the screen while scrolling in order to figure out what a bullet belongs to.

Then what alternative do you recommend for content creators? Do you use the alternative in Markdown front matter?

You should make what you do / don't do less of your identity. You're limiting yourself because you identify as "not the kind of person who does that".

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#135

Post by tvink »

wkat4242 wrote: post #117
torginus wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dunno, to me YAML is the python of markup languages. YAML is decent at handling things like nesting and arrays, while TOML sucks at it. I don't dislike YAML that much. That being said, we knew since the dawn of C macros that templating languages which are not aware of syntax, are AWFUL. Likewise, writing Helm charts (the place I encountered YAML templating) is just horrible, but would be so much nicer is templates re…

The biggest issue I have with Yaml is that they forbid tabs. Their argument is that tabs are shown differently in every editor which is actually something I like. When you're looking for something deeply nested you can reduce the tab distance a bit, when that's not needed you can increase it to improve visibility of nesting levels. And forbidding it makes a one-keystroke action a two or four one. I really don't under…

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-12/msg01...

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#138

Post by youerbt »

account-5 wrote: post #91
armchairhacker wrote: post #38

To me YAML seems like the CoffeeScript of JSON, and unlike CoffeeScript I don’t understand why people are still using it. I guess XML and JSON are too verbose. But YAML is so far in the opposite direction, we get the same surprise conversions we’ve had in Excel ( https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-fr... ). Why is “on” a boolean literal (of course so are “true”, “false”, as well as “yes”, “no”,…

Personally I prefer INI over nearly all configuration formats. https://github.com/madmurphy/libconfini/wiki/An-INI-critique...

I have seen this post on HN before and I wasn't received very well AFAIR.

But I can't help agreeing with its main point: so much complexity to support a few basic data types that are not sufficient for anything complex anyway.

Re: Why are we templating YAML? (2019)

#140

Post by gtirloni »

krapp wrote: post #97
Draiken wrote: post #72

I agree that YAML templating is kind of insane, but I will never understand why we don't stop using fake languages and simply use a real language. If you need complex logic, use a programming language and generate the YAML/JSON/whatever with it. There you go. Fixed it for you. Ruby, Python, or any other language really (I only favor scripting ones because they're generally easier to run), will give you all of that wi…

You shouldn't need the full complexity and power of a Turing complete programming language to do config. The point of config is to describe a state, it's just data. You don't need an application within an application to describe state. Inevitably, the path of just using a programming language for config leads to your config becoming more and more complex until it inevitably needs its own config, etc. You wind up with…

> You don't need an application within an application to describe state.

As shown in the article, you apparently do.

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