Using it a lot more lately as I'm diving into Ansible, so I'll be interested to see if I run into problems.
Ansible does make some efforts to limit jinja templating to variable substitution, but it's sill not that great, you have all kinds of weird stuff that can happen specially with colons.
The worst one is saltstack, the resulting syntax is just atrocious and border line unreadable, I not a big fan of map.jinja files[0] and on the yaml side, things can get ugly quite fast [1].
I know it's not a popular opinion, but I would rather use the puppet DSL, even with its step learning curve.
[0] https://github.com/saltstack-formulas/salt-formula/blob/mast...
[1] https://github.com/saltstack-formulas/mysql-formula/blob/mas...
I also have come to agree that a DSL is the best solution, though Puppet's particular DSL is not a great example. Projects that re-implement the same thing from scratch like mgmt[1] are on the right track, but probably won't gain enough traction.
[1] https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/blob/master/docs/language...
Do you have a link to the document you were pointed to when you got penalized? If it was Google who penalized you, they must have pointed you to a URL with documentation on why you got penalized and how to resolve it.
I ask this because I run a few websites with even lesser markup than your site but I have never got penalized. I once got penalized due to excessive number of spam comments on one of my websites and they pointed me to https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/190597 ("Remove this message from your site") to resolve the issue. This issue did not affect the search ranking much though (dropped by only about 2 or 3 places in the list of results). But never had an issue with abnormally low markup.
The markup in your website looks pretty reasonable to me, so I am surprised you could get penalized for that when I have had no issues with even lesser markup and they still appear at the top of the list of results for relevant search terms.
> I have had no issues with even lesser markup and they still appear at the top of the list of results for relevant search terms.
It seems people are finding my site, whether or not it's being penalized. I mean, someone other than me posted it here, right?
At any rate, it's worth mentioning that in the conclusion I wrote:
> Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like YAML is absolutely terrible but it’s not exactly great either.
I still use YAML myself even when I have the freedom to use something else simply because – for better or worse – it's very widespread, and for many tasks it's "good enough". For other tasks, I prefer to avoid it.
I think that a stricter version of YAML (such as StrictYAML) would make a lot of people's lives easier though.