There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
TOML is not a very good format IMO. It’s fine for very simple config structures, but as soon as you have any level of nesting at all it becomes an unobvious mess. Worse than YAML even.
What is this even?
[[fruits]]
name = "apple"
[fruits.physical]
color = "red"
shape = "round"
[[fruits.varieties]]
name = "red delicious"
[[fruits.varieties]]
name = "granny smith"
[[fruits]]
name = "banana"
[[fruits.varieties]]
name = "plantain"
That’s an example from the docs, and I have literally no idea what structure it makes. Compare to the JSON which is far more obvious:
{
"fruits": [
{
"name": "apple",
"physical": {
"color": "red",
"shape": "round"
},
"varieties": [
{ "name": "red delicious" },
{ "name": "granny smith" }
]
},
{
"name": "banana",
"varieties": [
{ "name": "plantain" }
]
}
]
}
The fact that they have to explain the structure by showing you the corresponding JSON says a lot.
JSON5 is much better IMO. Unfortunately it isn’t as popular and doesn’t have as much ecosystem support.
You’re using a purposely convoluted example from the spec. And I think it shows exactly how TOML is better than JSON for creating config files.
The TOML file is a lot easier to scan than the hopelessly messy json file. The mix of indentation and symbols used in JSON really does not do well in bigger configuration files.
