TOML: Tom's Obvious Minimal Language
TOML is, indeed, a human friendly config format. Whereas INI is a simple config format.<p>YAML&#x2F;JSON&#x2F;CSV&#x2F;XML&#x2F;etc are not config formats at all. They are data serialization formats. If you don&#x27;t know the difference, you probably didn&#x27;t get a CS degree, or read or understand the specs.<p>Config formats should be tailored to the application, because the entire point of a config file is to make it easy for a human to configure one specific application. That&#x27;s why there are 100 different config file formats for old UNIX programs. For each one, it&#x27;s vastly easier to use that one config format for that one application, than it would be to force some arbitrary data serialization format to represent what the human really wanted the program to do.<p>TOML is better than YAML or INI for a config file, but what&#x27;s best is rolling your own format. It literally leads to better outcomes. The user can express what they want faster, easier, clearer, and the application doesn&#x27;t have to struggle with alternate implementations of the spec for some poorly defined data serialization format.