Alternatives

There are no shortage of well established alternatives to NestedText for storing data in a human-readable text file. The features and shortcomings of some of these alternatives are discussed next.

JSON

JSON is a subset of JavaScript suitable for holding data. Like NestedText, it consists of a hierarchical collection of dictionaries, lists, and strings, but also allows integers, floats, Booleans and nulls. The fundamental problem with JSON in this context is that its meant for serializing and exchanging data between programs; it’s not meant for configuration files. Of course, it’s used for this purpose anyways, where it has a number of glaring shortcomings.

To begin, it has an excessive amount of syntactic clutter. Dictionary keys and strings both have to be quoted, commas are required between dictionary and list items (but forbidden after the last item), braces are required around dictionaries, etc. Features that would improve clarity are also lacking. Comments are not allowed, multiline strings are not supported, and whitespace is insignificant (leading to the possibility that the appearance of the data may not match its true structure). More conceptually, it is the responsibility of the user to provide data of the correct type (e.g. 32 vs. 32.0 vs. "32"), even though the application already knows what type it expects. All of this results in JSON being a frustrating format for humans to read, enter or edit.

NestedText has the following clear advantages over JSON as human readable and writable data file format:

  • text does not require quotes

  • data is left in its original form

  • comments

  • multiline strings

  • special characters without escaping them

  • commas are not used to separate dictionary and list items

YAML

YAML is considered by many to be a human friendly alternative to JSON, but over time it has accumulated too many data types and too many formats. To distinguish between all the various types and formats, a complicated and non-intuitive set of rules developed. YAML at first appears very appealing when used with simple examples, but things can quickly become complicated or provide unexpected results. A reaction to this is the use of YAML subsets, such as StrictYAML. However, the subsets still try to maintain compatibility with YAML and so inherit much of its complexity. For example, both YAML and StrictYAML support nine different ways of writing multiline strings.

YAML avoids excessive quoting and supports comments and multiline strings, but like JSON it converts data to the underlying data types as appropriate, but unlike with JSON, the lack of quoting makes the format ambiguous, which means it has to guess at times, and small seemingly insignificant details can affect the result.

NestedText was inspired by YAML, but eschews its complexity. It has the following clear advantages over YAML as human readable and writable data file format:

  • simple

  • unambiguous (no implicit typing)

  • data is left in its original form

  • syntax is insensitive to special characters within text

  • safe, no risk of malicious code execution

TOML

TOML is a configuration file format inspired by the well-known INI syntax. It supports a number of basic data types (notably including dates and times) using syntax that is more similar to JSON (explicit but verbose) than to YAML (succinct but confusing). As discussed previously, though, this makes it the responsibility of the user to specify the correct type for each field, when it should be the responsibility of the application to convert each field to the correct type.

Another flaw in TOML is that it is difficult to specify deeply nested structures. The only way to specify a nested dictionary is to give the full key to that dictionary, relative to the root of the entire hierarchy. This is not much a problem if the hierarchy only has 1-2 levels, but any more than that and you find yourself typing the same long keys over and over. A corollary to this is that TOML-based configurations do not scale well: increases in complexity are often accompanied by disproportionate decreases in readability and writability.

NestedText has the following clear advantages over TOML as human readable and writable data file format:

  • text does not require quotes

  • data is left in its original form

  • indentation used to succinctly represent nested data

  • the structure of the file matches the structure of the data