YAML™ (rhymes with “camel”) is a human-readable, cross language, and unicode based digital information serialization language. It supports the various data types used by common programming languages. It is broadly useful for programming needs such as configuration, digital messaging, object persistence, and data auditing.

Both JSON and YAML aim to be human readable data interchange formats. However, JSON and YAML have different priorities. JSON’s foremost design goal is simplicity and universality. Thus, JSON is trivial to generate and parse, at the cost of reduced human readability. It also uses a lowest common denominator information model, ensuring any JSON data can be easily processed by every modern programming environment.