A building permits desk wants engineers to hand-edit site inventory—hostnames, management IPs, and uplink roles—before generating device configs. Which encoding best fits that human-centric workflow?

YAML’s readability, optional comments, and indentation-based structure make it a preferred human-edited source for inventory and variables that later feed templates. Automation pipelines often load YAML into structured data, then render device configs. Minified JSON is compact for APIs but awkward for day-to-day human editing. ASN.1 BER and TCAM dumps are machine-oriented and unsuitable as editable inventory. Choose YAML when the primary author is an engineer, not a parser.