Re: Thoughts on the standardization of Org

[Russell Adams]

On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 08:22:01PM -0400, Asa Zeren wrote:
> First, I would like to repeat the importance of developing standards
> for org-mode. If we want to expand the influence of org, tooling must
> expand beyond Emacs.

I disagree. There are other open text based formats outside of
Emacs. That Org is so compelling is because it's tightly integrated
into an Emacs mode which makes using Org data so easy.

Like many open source projects no one is paid to work on and develop
Org. Despite the best volunteer efforts, Org has burnt out many
volunteer maintainers along the way. To ask for more of Org outside of
Emacs when the main Org project inside Emacs is understaffed seems a
backward notion to me.

> While Emacs is an amazing tool, (a) we cannot convince the entire
> world to use Emacs

We also cannot expect our maintainers to spend their time on the world
outside of Emacs.

> (b) org-mode should be integrated into tooling unrelated to text
> editing, and is outside of the Emacs-Lisp environment.

Isn't that the opposite goal? Org mode is all about your data being
text only and easy to edit inside Emacs, so why would "unrelated to
text editing and outside Emacs" be of any interest or worth any time?

> Without additional org implementations, this is impossible. If org
> catches on before it is standardized, we end up in the situation of
> Markdown, with many competing standards and non-standards. Hence,
> standardization is essential.

Org has caught on. Org has a reference implementation, which you could
consider the standard parser. Org isn't just the format, it's the
editing experience. That's only realized inside of Emacs.

Could it benefit from better documentation, and finishing up some
rough edges? Of course. That would be an excellent place to spend
volunteer time.

I can't recommend asking for volunteer time on tools outside of Emacs
though.

I've recommended a few times now the idea that if you want to work on
Org data outside of Emacs, use Org to do an export your data into a
machine readable format (xml, json, etc). Don't parse it directly from
text. I believe there are already exporters which can help with that,
and they may be worthy of additional effort.

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Russell Adams                            RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.com

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