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

[David Kastrup]

"Eric S. Raymond" <address@hidden> writes:

> 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.

Since you shifted your religious affiliation from a heavy-weight logical
markup language not intended for human perusal to an easier-on-the-eye
visual markup system, it does not follow that your conclusions are valid
for a light-weight logical markup language intended to be written by
humans.

> 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.

Good thing then that Emacs' documentation is not written in Docbook/XML.

> 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.

Well, things like

    In order to get the result @file{text}, you would write
    @samp{@@address@hidden@}} in your source file.  File markups may be
    line-wrapped after slashes without introducing a hyphen if this is
    required in the PDF version.

are a bit tricky to express in an input-is-output visual markup
language.

-- 
David Kastrup