New standard...

There was some discussion on this list about the new standard, and  
while it's probably too late for such a change, I thought I'd mention  
an idea I had related to default_flow_style (in PyYAML).

Because YAML supports other object types on the same line, the colon  
is an ambiguous character. This means that when a human is editing a  
YAML document, they have to take care to quote any strings containing  
a colon, which introduces other issues.  For example:

I want to encode the sentence "Beef: it's what's for dinner" under the  
'doc' key.  This would end up as:

doc: 'Beef: it''s what''s for dinner'

The string is quoted, and you have to escape the quotes. This is  
because of the ambiguity cased by parsing:

doc:
	Beef: it's what's for dinner

I think YAML could be changed so that the default behavior encouraged  
human editing over the compact form, without sacrificing the choice.

What I propose is using a double colon to indicate the compact form.   
That way a human can type:

doc: Beef: it's what's for dinner

Which won't be confused with the second form, which becomes

doc:: Beef: it's what's for dinner

This way the user typing a sentence doesn't have to worry about the  
sentence content.  The user who is trying to encode a more complex  
object knows how to do so, and will use the double colon encoding...

Douglas Mayle

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