YAML

Definition

YAML is a whitespace-significant superset of JSON used for configuration. GitHub Actions, Kubernetes manifests, Docker Compose, Ansible playbooks, and most modern dev-tool configs use YAML. Its readability comes at a cost: indentation bugs and ambiguous type coercion (the Norway problem) make it less suitable as a serialisation format for data exchange between programs.

When to use

See also

• JSON-LD — JSON for Linking Data — the JSON syntax for embedding schema.org structured data in a web page.
• JSONL — Newline-delimited JSON — one JSON object per line, used for streaming logs, datasets, and LLM batch input.