YAML stands for ‘yet another markup language’. It is a data serialization language often used for writing configuration files. However, YAML is not markup language emphasizing that it’s for data. Instead, it’s a strict superset of JSON designed for human interaction. YAML is a popular programming language as it’s human-readable and easy to use. Moreover, you can leverage it in conjunction with other programming languages.
YAML uses Python-style indentation to specify nesting. Whitespaces are used because tab characters are not allowed. In the start, YAML was helpful to people working with data. It leverages Unicode printable characters; some provide structure information, while others contain the data.
- Everyday use cases of YAML are cross-language data sharing and debugging of complex data structures, cross-language data sharing, object persistence, and interprocess messaging.
- Moreover, it defines data structures that are easy to understand. These data structures are easy to manage and maintain by users.
- YAML is easy to process and fast to load in the memory as it has fast implementation.
