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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

I am the author of this article. Apparently people read my website (how they get there, I don't know?)

At any rate, it's worth mentioning that in the conclusion I wrote:

> Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like YAML is absolutely terrible but it’s not exactly great either.

I still use YAML myself even when I have the freedom to use something else simply because – for better or worse – it's very widespread, and for many tasks it's "good enough". For other tasks, I prefer to avoid it.

I think that a stricter version of YAML (such as StrictYAML) would make a lot of people's lives easier though.

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I think you're probably right there. I use YAML when something else I'm using calls for it, but mainly I tend to output things in it just because it's very readable.

Using it a lot more lately as I'm diving into Ansible, so I'll be interested to see if I run into problems.

It is particularly unfortunate that ansible uses yaml because if infrastructure is going to be code, some day you will surely want to refactor.

The trend of "stick together Yaml and a template engine, we have our DSL!" in CM sytems is a bit horrible.

Ansible does make some efforts to limit jinja templating to variable substitution, but it's sill not that great, you have all kinds of weird stuff that can happen specially with colons.

The worst one is saltstack, the resulting syntax is just atrocious and border line unreadable, I not a big fan of map.jinja files[0] and on the yaml side, things can get ugly quite fast [1].

I know it's not a popular opinion, but I would rather use the puppet DSL, even with its step learning curve.

[0] https://github.com/saltstack-formulas/salt-formula/blob/mast...

[1] https://github.com/saltstack-formulas/mysql-formula/blob/mas...

The whole concept of templating language on top of YAML is suspect anyway, but I wish Salt had just gone with Mako as the default templating language. That way you could write plain Python in your templates and not have this horrible misuse of Jinja.

I also have come to agree that a DSL is the best solution, though Puppet's particular DSL is not a great example. Projects that re-implement the same thing from scratch like mgmt[1] are on the right track, but probably won't gain enough traction.

[1] https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/blob/master/docs/language...

I love the clean style of your website.

Thanks! Last time I checked my domain got penalized for having abnormal low markup or some such, which apparently makes it look like a spam site. I am proud of this.

What a time to be alive

Penalised? By whom?

I would assume tehGoog. Just to make it hard to find low impact sites that aren't AMP.

Oh I see. Thanks.

The only search engine in town. You already know its name.

Oh you mean Ask Jeeves?

No, he means Hotbot.

> Last time I checked my domain got penalized for having abnormal low markup or some such

Do you have a link to the document you were pointed to when you got penalized? If it was Google who penalized you, they must have pointed you to a URL with documentation on why you got penalized and how to resolve it.

I ask this because I run a few websites with even lesser markup than your site but I have never got penalized. I once got penalized due to excessive number of spam comments on one of my websites and they pointed me to https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/190597 ("Remove this message from your site") to resolve the issue. This issue did not affect the search ranking much though (dropped by only about 2 or 3 places in the list of results). But never had an issue with abnormally low markup.

The markup in your website looks pretty reasonable to me, so I am surprised you could get penalized for that when I have had no issues with even lesser markup and they still appear at the top of the list of results for relevant search terms.

I think it was some tool at moz.com, but I don't recall from the top of my head. I don't think it was Google itself. I have no idea what effect that has; I'm not really in to that world.

> I have had no issues with even lesser markup and they still appear at the top of the list of results for relevant search terms.

It seems people are finding my site, whether or not it's being penalized. I mean, someone other than me posted it here, right?

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