Trying to avoid using YAML

[reilly]

Hi all!

I just downloaded Obsidian (loving it so far!) a couple days ago and I’ve been learning a lot.

It seems like everyone has their own particular way of doing things, but I want to know if anyone has some thoughts and advice about how I plan to deal with metadata and tags.

My plan:

I really don’t like how YAML looks at the top of all of my notes, and it seems like everything YAML can do can be done in other ways. So to use all of the metadata features without using YAML, at the bottom of all templates I’m going to include the following callout:

> [!NOTE] Tags
> #tag0 #tag1 #tag2 #tag3
> <span style=“display:none;”>
> key1:: value1
> key2:: value2
> </span>

The tags are visible in Reader mode and the custom keys are not (I find them ugly when visible in the callout), but the keys and tags are accessible by Dataview.

Does anyone do anything similar to this? If not, what do you do? Are there any use cases for YAML front matter besides for Dataview that I’m not aware of?

Thanks so much!

[CawlinTeffid]

I do similar, without the callout. Sometimes I put the whole list in a comment (generally in a piece of writing where I want to exclude stuff like that from the word count). I don’t have a strong reason; it just feels simpler and is good enough for me. I don’t even use DataView. (Of course, all of my practices are subject to change. )

There are 2 features that I think are YAML-only: aliases and adding a CSS class.