Re: Literal for plain style string

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 12:44:45PM -0700, Ingy dot Net wrote:
| I think the only thing Trans wants is to be able to not use the '|'
| literal block indicator. So he can have natural looking config files
| without any weird markup chars.
| 
| 
|     ---
|     name: John Doe
|     order:
|        qty  desc  price
|         2   foo   $1.23
|         3   bar   $3.21
| 
| Normal folding rules would mangle this. YAML requires:
| 
|     ---
|     name: John Doe
|     order: |
|        qty  desc  price
|         2   foo   $1.23
|         3   bar   $3.21
| 
| But the '|' pipe looks weird to a novice. Even a smart novice.
| 
| We *could* make the rule be, if the content starts on the next line,
| literal folding happens, else traditional folding.
| 
| So this:
| 
|     ---
|     stuff: this ia a lot of stuff
|       and is on several lines
|       and it is folded
| 
| I think that both these use cases fit the common usage.


Do you have a transition plan for how we migrate versions?  People
arn't using the %YAML version.  Perhaps something like this would
work...

  1. We have YAML processors start to raise an error if any
     multi-line plain scalar is used, unless they have a 
     %YAML version
 
  2. We redo the specfication to reflect these changes, update
     the productions, etc.  This involves alot of dancing around
     the edge cases with lots of regression examples.

  3. We convince implementers to support two versions at once
     based on the %YAML directive

  4. After about 3-4 years we permit plain scalars without 
     requiring a %YAML directive

Is this what you had in mind?  While the change may be an OK idea,
it's the labor involved in implementating the change and the 
transition of existing users that I'm concerned about.  

Best,

Clark

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