Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language (like INI, only better) (opens in new tab)

1. If indentation is significant and required, dotted notation should be optional:

    [foo]
        [bar]
            [car]

2. Support include files. With #1 implemented, includes would be extremely powerful and flexible. Since indentation is required, no special syntax is needed to relatively position the included files. And without requiring dotted notation in keys, include files can be reused in a configuration (such as common settings in the [servers] section of the example).

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5272634

I personally never jumped on YAML or JSON. I liked that they weren't XML, but they each felt like XML++ too much for me. There was still too much, I don't know, weirdness/typing/oops! Don't get me wrong, I think they were better than XML, but only marginally. It would be nice to see more of a phase change type of approach. I'd LOVE to see something like this (or something else) that involves much less typing/special characters/etc than YAML and JSON.

Personal opinion.

     value = "example # no that's not a comment" # but here's one

As far as I can see both the C# and Python parsers don't handle this kind of comment correctly at the moment, and probably many implementations will have troubles with that. They should just drop this option in my opinion.

Personally, of course, I think we should just use a slightly modified version of s-exprs which would be easier to parse.

(:keyword value)

where value can be an atom, list of atoms or a list of keyword value pairs. Comments could follow the Lisp convention and start with semi-colon and end with newline. Only 5 characters to escape, namely, '(', ')', ':', ' ' and ';'.