The problem is not the significant whitespace. It's producing serialized data using a templating language. That's never going to be a good solution to anything.
People hated s-expressions in Lisp, so instead of parentheses we ended up with angle brackets. Now there are programming languages built with XML syntax. There are at least a few things with YAML syntax that’s tied to implicit semantics, including the YAMLScript language.
I kind of have to wonder what was so bad about s expressions after all.
the complaint I recall is that people don't like the way they nest, but I've had to write regex for xml and lisp, and I must say the lisp is much more pleasant. Perhaps the only difference on the post-parsing end is that in xml, there is a special place to nest children, that's really the only benefit I can think of even though you have to go through more trouble.
