SEP 22: Frontmatter Formatting

Currently (2023-04-09) document frontmatter is authored in YAML (pyyaml). I don’t particularly like yaml. It’s quite heavy weight dependency given that all I need is a set key/value pairs and lists.

In some ways JSON makes for a reasonable choice. I already use JSON in the site build for serializing the search engine data set and for restoring state for partial builds, so it would knock out the YAML dependency without introducing a new one. It’s also just as widely used as YAML, and is basically the same as the format that I mutate throughout the build.

The only thing I don’t like about JSON is the requirement for quoting keys, and the need for opening and closing braces (’’).