You can find the summary that we generated during our last go at this at
http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiText (01)
I don't claim that it is the ultimate, but it merges several sets that I
found. (02)
If we were to try for some reasonable standard, I have done some work on
possible markup based on the notions of recognizable character contexts and
characters that do not occur in that position in English text. (03)
I don't think that it is possible to evolve a standard, but we could begin
to work on principles: (04)
I continue to work with a few competing concepts: (05)
* The rules should be easy enough to remember that they are easy enough to
use. It is possible to develop a structured text that is as hard or harder
to handle than HTML..
* The markup should support as many of the features available in HTML as
possible.
* The text should be reasonably easy to parse. Making the rules easy to
remember is a start.
* The plain text should be readable without causing too much distraction. (06)
This leads me to a few preferences: (07)
* Use leading characters for headlines rather than underlining.
* Use indentation for controlling lists and indents. Some systems get
carried away. ReStructuredText is one.
http://collab.blueoxen.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiText There is a link to a
record of alternatives.
* There must be a simple escape convention to make it easy to insert literal
markup.
* Some of the best systems add some form of keyword based pragmas, actions,
directives, etc. which can be very powerful. (08)
One of the other reasons for using such a markup is that for something like
a wiki, the TEXTAREA editor is the easiest thing available. (09)
Another is that the markup doesn't interfere much with the various plain
text tools available, particularly on Unix-like systems. (010)
Yet another is that if the mechanisms used for unconventional functions are
well enough identified, adding to them in order to experiment with a new
feature becomes somewhat easier. (011)
Thanks, (012)
Garold (Gary) L. Johnson (013)
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Seitz [mailto:bill@fluxent.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2003 4:45 AM
To: tools-yak@collab.blueoxen.net
Subject: [tools-yak@collab] Re: A ReStructuredText Primer (014)
What's the context for this thread? Picking a format for writing in
*all* tools that BlueOxen builds (wiki, email, ...)? (015)
I think it would be best to either pick someone else's format and follow
it religiously, or design something from scratch that has some
significant added value. (016)
I've listed some existing varieties, and also compared which are used by
some WikiEngines. (017)
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/SmartAscii
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiEngines
http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/WikiStandards (018)
Eric Armstrong wrote:
> Jonathan Cheyer wrote:
>
>> Mozilla uses a single slash for /italic/ emphasis by default. However,
>> it is configurable.
>>.............
>>
>> There does seem to be evidence that using slashes for italic emphasis
>> is common. Eric Raymond's Hacker Writing guide discusses this.
>>
http://purpleslurple.net/ps.php?theurl=http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/
Hacker-Writing-Style.html#purp119
>>
>>
>> I agree with Eric Armstrong that using a single asterisk for bold (and
>> a single slash for italic), the way Mozilla defaults to, seems more
>> intuitive to me than using a single asterisk for italic and double
>> asterisk for bold.
>>
>
> Thanks for sharing my instinctive opinion. On the other hand, I've
> changed my mind! (partially)
>
> I tend to use asterisks a *lot*. Kind of matter of habit. And after
> thinking about it a bit, I've decided that ReST's idea of converting
> that to the standard typography for "emphasis" (namely, italics) is
> the right thing to do.
>
> And I have to agree that "/" is too commonly used in paths to use it
> for a typographic signature. (Mozilla does a nice job of parsing it,
> but it does add complexity to the parser.) So using "*" for italics
> makes a lot of sense.
>
> That view leaves the issue of how to indicate bold. ReST chose "extra
> emphasis" (**) as the way to do it. I'm not a big fan of that, mainly
> because of the extra characters. So I'm thinking that maybe !this!
> should be bold. It makes a bit of sense. And it's pretty easy to
> parse, so this isn't bold! !But this is!
> (019)
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