I get your point, and for many uses, I'd agree. I may yet go with YAML. One issue is that I'd like this to optionally be part of a pod document - I'll first run Pod::HTML on the text file, then parse the form fields into HTML within that generated document. This will allow the text file to contain things like survey section headings and commentary paragraphs. I'm not sure that would integrate too well with YAML (though I suppose I could mark YAML sections and parse them separately). Maybe by describing my audience as "non-techies" I was misstating my goal. My first goal is to make this something that I can quickly whip up a survey by making the simplest possible podfile and generating from that.