Ron Mayer <rm_pg@cheapcomplexdevices.com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Hmm. So the argument for it is "let's make a machine-readable format
>> more human-readable"? I'm not getting the point. People should look
>> at the regular text output.
> IMHO YAML beats the regular text format for human-readability -
> at least for people with narrow terminal windows, and for novices.
> Greg posted examples comparing regular-text vs yaml vs json here:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2009-08/msg02090.php
Mph. Maybe I've been looking at the traditional format too long,
but I don't find the YAML version better --- it's so verbose that
you could only see a small fraction of a query at a time.
The main strike against the traditional format IME is exactly what
Greg alludes to in that message: it's prone to being rendered totally
unreadable by email line-wrapping. However, I'm unconvinced that YAML
would be any better; it looks like it's still critically dependent on
the location and amount of whitespace in order to be readable. The
lines might be a bit shorter on average, but you're still going to hit
a narrow window's right margin pretty quick in any complicated plan.
In any case, the real killer is email clients that feel no obligation to
preserve whitespace layout at all, and this would certainly not look
much better after that treatment.
regards, tom lane
