hi Wendell,
first, thanks for your input.
Von: Wendell Piez [mailto:wapiez(_at_)mulberrytech(_dot_)com]
At 08:01 AM 7/8/2004, you wrote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
a list
======
* item 1
* item 2
with some *emphasized* or ``tt`` text
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It is readable, and writable, but:
Is it learnable? (how do I know that * delimits emphasis,
except when it
doesn't? what if I want bold not italics? what if I do
~this~, what comes out?)
What happens when it contains glitches?
The problems you describe is exactly the reason why i did not develop another
format myself.
ReST is a format which I only chose. It seems to be one of the better wiki like
ML languages. It is currently in development but seems to be quite usable
already. From what I know about it it has some really good developers which
have much more experience doing such a thing that i ever might have. (For more
details see the docutils website.)
Learnable? Well, it certainly is another language to learn and that's also a
complaint I got from an xsldoc user. On the other hand it is quite a simple
format (if you stick to the basics which are probably only used for the text in
XML comments anyway) but *can* do complex things if you need them.
How does an author know whether it is properly formed,
without concepts
analogous to XML "well-formedness" and "valid", and tools to
implement
their specifications? Is there any way to know the
correctness of the input
besides running the process and inspecting the output? If so,
what is it
the process that generates XHTML out of the txt format does give quite good
error messages, so it does validate its format. But you are right, that this
still is an area which I have not really looked into.
and how is it specified? If not, who owns, controls, and
maintains the
ur-process that controls everything?
Also, I question how easy it is to process into XHTML
afterwards. It may be
easy to do the first 80% but I submit that the last 20% --
and all the
subsequent desiderata like "how do I make a list item with
more than one
line in it?" -- will probably drive you crazy.
that is not the scope of my app as i only use the docutils format and their
developers have sorted out the main things already. I am just a user of the
format and so have to hope that the docutils project does what they say it
should (which i think they do btw).
Part of what makes XML so powerful -- for those that have
eyes to see -- is
that it handles these questions in such a robust way. No, XML
syntax is not
perfect. But the syntax is just the beginning of a markup
application, not
the end. XML has not only got a syntax, it has a very sophisticated
processing model as well, which can be used to address
questions such as
those I've asked above. Part of XML's sophistication is
evident in how
simple it appears to be, and basically is, while it can
likewise scale in
complexity to address very difficult, and various, problems.
But that simplicity took years -- decades -- of experimenting
with markup
languages before anything solidified (it happened to be SGML)
to the point
that it could be reinvented as "XML".
I like WikiML and the whole notion of reduced, learnable,
plain-text markup
conventions, and I'll take it as a sign of real progress when
one emerges
with a design compelling enough, and a processing model robust enough
(it'll have to go beyond "check correctness by eyeballing
output"), to
unseat the currently-dominant paradigm. Anything not as
dead-simple as
<tag>this</tag> is going to be a pain to learn, teach, maintain.
And it would be ironic if a utility you developed to help you
maintain
stylesheets became a maintenance headache of its own.
I am convinced that XML is a great format for various reasons (may it only that
it is a standard *a lot* of people agreed on and use). Certainly there will be
an even better format in the future, but not the near one...
XML is just not very suitable for the area I need an ML language for. a wiki
style ML is much better for that as it is much more readable and writable and
IMHO is learnable with neglectable effort.
You asked for opinions ... I agree with David and DaveP on this one.
Cheers,
Wendell
thanks
chris