Member-only story
Is YAML Ready For JavaScript?
Compare XML, JSON, and YAML to see the trends for data formatting
What is the world’s most popular programming language?
DevOps vendor Datree.io said it is YAML. After analyzing millions of open source GitHub projects, Datree.io found 60 million YAML files. In addition, it discovered at least one YAML file in more than 10,000 private repositories.
What is YAML?
YAML, a recursive acronym for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”, is a human-readable data-serialization language. It is commonly used for configuration files and in applications where data is being stored or transmitted. For example, YAML has been used by Swagger, a toolset for OpenAPI that is a standard for both server and client. YAML is often used in projects written in C++, Go, Java, JavaScript, Rust, and Python.
The YAML story starts from XML.
XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
Definition
XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. It uses tags to define the structure, similar to HTML.
XML is an application of SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). Its first draft was published in 1996 at Sun Microsystems. XML 1.0 became a W3C Recommendation on February 10, 1998.
XML has three main functionalities:
- It is a markup language.
- It is a data format transferred between the client and the server.
- It is used to define configurations.
XML had its prime time, but it is declining.
As a markup language, XML can be transformed to HTML with XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). However, modern web applications are written by JavaScript framework/libraries, such as React, Angular, and Vue. XML is no longer a viable choice to build websites.
XML was the default to send data between the client and the server. AJAX has been used to describe the XMLHttpRequest object that partially refreshes the webpage. Despite that AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, AJAX…
