[mericson]

"You're not trying to make a .INI file a little friendlier for a human programmer -- you're trying to make a collaborative Google doc a little friendlier for a parser."

That's exactly what we were aiming for. TOML, which I think is brilliant for config files, was actually a bit of an inspiration for this.

But for our use case, which typically involves longer copy blocks, TOML still felt closer to something a developer might grok than to something a reporter would intuitively understand.

It's also worth noting we make abundant use of other formats in our interactive graphics — from JSON to CSV to YAML — when the data is much more structured and unlikely to be touched by a wider group of people in the newsroom.

This is pretty clearly not a solution to all structured data; but rather, just the subset that we want to be easy to write and edit.