XML, JSON, and YAML Overview
This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 2, , on page 17, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at DrupalCon Amsterdam 2014, .
Web services, to enable their messages to be machine parsable, rely upon strictly-defined data-structuring languages, most popularly:
- XML (Extensible Markup Language) uses well-defined hierarchical elements that comprise tags that delimit content and can include attributes containing further information.
- JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) uses attribute-value pairs and no tags, making it more concise and human-readable than XML — hence its tremendous popularity outside the JavaScript world.
- YAML (a recursive acronym for YAML Ain't Markup Language) is largely a superset of JSON, and was chosen for Drupal 8 configuration management and project information files.
