Writing documentation in YAML

Mike Taylor

2 November 2012

Introduction

Everyone who has ever written documentation in XML knows there has to be a better way as a metaformat it's a disaster: ugly, clumsy, verbose, complex. Could YAML be used instead?

Anatomy of a YAML document

The top-level element is "doc". This contains a "title", "author" and "date" (all of them simple text) and one or more "section*" elements, numbers consecutively. Each section has a "title" and some "text".

Processing YAML to human-readable form

Use the "yaml2html" program.