* it is non-standard
Any objections?
+
+> Well, I don't have much standing since I have been too lame to integrate
+> ymlfront into ikiwiki yet. Buy, my opinion is, I liked the old
+> format of putting the YAML literally at the front of the file. It
+> seemed to allow parsing the file as YAML, using any arbitrary YAML
+> processer. And it was nice how it avoided boilerplate. --[[Joey]]
+
+>> The old delimited format also has the advantage of being remarkably similar to the
+>> [MultiMarkDown](http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/users_guide/multimarkdown_syntax_guide/)
+>> way of including metadata in documents. The only difference is that MMD doesn't expect the
+>> triple-dash separators, but I'm thinking about submitting a patch to MMD to actually support
+>> that syntax. --GB
+
+>>> Yes, the idea was to allow the file to be parsed as YAML, you're right. I just found that I tended to have problems when people used "---" for horizontal rules. However, I have also found that trying to keep it solely as an IkiWiki directive doesn't work either, since sometimes the meta-data I need also contained "]]" which broke the parsing of the directive.
+>>> So I have decided to go for a compromise, and make the delimiter configurable, rather than hardcoded as "---"; the triple-dash is the default, but it can be configured to be something else instead. I haven't pushed the change yet, but I have written it, and it seems to work. -- [[KathrynAndersen]]
+
+>>>> I'm not sure about what kind of problems you're meeting with "---" being used
+>>>> for horizontal rules: isn't it sufficient to just check that (1) the triple-dash
+>>>> is the first thing in the page and (2) there are only YAML-style assignments
+>>>> (and no blank lines) between the two markers? Check #2 would also be enough to
+>>>> support MMD-style metadata, which means (a) no start marker and (b) empty line
+>>>> to mark the end of the metadata block. Would this be supported by the plugin?
+>>>> --GB