Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sankao 1614 days ago
Why yaml? The web already has a markup language.
2 comments

This is bike shedding. The nuances of which principles to use to convert notebooks to standalone apps are complex with unexpected trade-off, so instead you prefer to focus on the borderline inconsequential point of the format.
Mercury was inspired by R Markdown where YAML is used. I think that YAML is quite easy way to quickly define simple User Interface.
This is also similar to the header formatting for Weave.jl, markdown for Julia.[1] This is probably also inspired by R markdown, but I mention it because it seems to be a reasonably common practice in tools for the data science field.

[1] http://weavejl.mpastell.com/stable/header/#Header-Configurat...