Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: doc formats

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Let's put the bottom line at the top to establish context for the
whinging :-) to follow.

In the end I think you're just going to end up with something possibly
as powerful as XML and certainly as confusing, trading overall
regularity for some additional readability for simple documents.  Is
it worth your time?

That's a genuine question.  I don't know the answer, but I really
don't see a big bang to inventing a new plaintext markup syntax, while
I do see a big bang to some of the other stuff that awiki offers as I
understand it, like the advanced versioning file system backend.

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Lord <address@hidden> writes:

    Thomas>   Of course there are many.  It is odd to hear of people
    Thomas> in the Python community, Python being a language that
    Thomas> eschews braces in favor of indentation, argue otherwise.

The argument is not that it's impossible; it's that anything as
powerful as XML will generally look like XML without the <>.  In the
special cases where it doesn't, the XML generally doesn't look so
horrible.  Furthermore, regarding getting rid of the <>, remember that
ISO 8879 SGML allows a lot of stuff the XML doesn't, specifically much
minimization of syntax.  You have to wonder why they dropped that, and
whether you'll be able to solve that problem if you hit it.

(Admittedly, this is FUD, but I see the net benefit to what you're
doing with plaintext markup as equally marginal.)

    Thomas> Hollywood screenwriters and paralegal assistants learn
    Thomas> special formatting rules for plain text for screenplays
    Thomas> and court filings -- the Awiki approach to wikis can
    Thomas> formalize that.

The problem is that it needs to formalize *both*, at least for
wikipedia.  This means that anybody who wants to edit those is going
to need to refer to the DTD anyway, since the rules will be different.
Just because you understand Python indentation rules doesn't mean
Haskell's offsides rule will make sense immediately.  Also, the more
powerful awiki becomes, the more the newbies are going to run into
situations where the natural language they want to write is preempted
by awiki syntax.

Random combustible comments:

    Thomas> * First: is there a nicer (closer to plain-text, more
    Thomas> directly legible) simple syntax for XML in general?

Well, since XML is just LISP with obese parentheses with internal
structure, the answer is "yes".  ;-)

    Thomas> About the ReST:

  Stephen> Don't ASSume.  The "re" in reStructured Text means "again", 
  Stephen> as in Structured Text, version 2. [it doesn't mean "regular
  Stephen> expression"]

    Thomas> You are mistaken.  It is a pun and means both.  See the
    Thomas> "History" section at:

    Thomas> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/doc-sig/2000-November/001239.html

You've eval'd once too often!  Sure, the play on the *name* of the re
module is like the use of CPython to indicate the usual implementation
when you need to distinguish from Jython.  That doesn't imply that
CPython programs have C-like syntax!

    Thomas> One interesting question is how to adapt the technique to
    Thomas> other scripts besides ASCII.

Every kanji counts for two columns, anybody?  Or should it be three in
UTF-8, with latin-1 getting 2?  ;-)



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