Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Eric S. Raymond]

David Kastrup <address@hidden>:
> When looking at existing Texinfo source, I get a good idea of how to
> write Texinfo markup of my own.  When looking at AsciiDoc, I have no
> clue since it is not apparent what is formatting, and what is content.

That's a feature, not a bug.

I used to be a fan of heavy, explicit document markup; DocBookXML was
my weapon of choice for large documents.  It took a bit of mental
readjustment when I first experimented with minimal, new-school
markups like markdown and asciidoc.

But then my perspective shifted. Now I like the fact that that the
markup obtrudes very little on the actual content.  I get to write *foo*
instead of <emphasis>foo</emphasis> and you know what?  It's better -
lower overhead not just in typed characters but in the amount of
attention required to read it structurally.

I also found that I had underestimated the practical value of not
having to render a document to get it to a plain-ASCII format
friendly to a human eyeball.  This cuts out a lot of friction that
you won't notice until it's gone.
-- 
                <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>