Tony Finch – blog

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Style Pass

2024-05-06 10:30:02

As is typical for static site generators, each page on this web site is generated from a file containing markdown with YAML frontmatter.

Neither markdown nor YAML are good. Markdown is very much the worse-is-better of markup languages; YAML, on the other hand, is more like better-is-worse. YAML has too many ways of expressing the same things, and the lack of redundancy in its syntax makes it difficult to detect mistakes before it is too late. YAML’s specification is incomprehensible.

The top-level value in a YAML document does not have to be an array or object: you can use its wild zoo of string syntax too, so for example,

Markdown is very sensitive to indentation, so all the tooling (most importantly my editor) gets righteously confused if markdown is placed in a container that introduces extra indentation.

The static site generator for www.dns.cam.ac.uk uses --- | to mark the start of the markdown in its source files. This worked really nicely.