A critique of YAML's strengths and weaknesses, outlining what a successor format should preserve and improve. Key strengths worth keeping include whitespace-based hierarchy, format independence from any single language, easy embedding of multi-line documents, and being purely declarative data. Key improvements needed are a much simpler grammar (eliminating rarely-used features and attack surfaces like billion laughs), proper schema support to resolve type ambiguity, and dropping the JSON superset requirement if it causes design compromises.
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