[Python-Dev] Re: Python-dev summary for 2002-08-15 - 2002-09-01

[François Pinard]

[Aahz]

> Ewww.  I hate "mailto:" because it interferes with cut'n'paste.

I read that you cannot cut and paste a string preceded by `mailto:'?  Is it
what you meant?  What is this interference you mention?

What I like in `mailto:' for text or message bodies, is that my editor and
mail user agent highlights it and makes it clickable.  I would be tempted to
guess that other editors do this too, but the truth is that I do not know.
Maybe we should not let the strengths and drawbacks of the various editors we
use drive us into religious feelings for or against a specific markup.  Yet,
such comparisons let us have an overall feeling on the usefulness of a
particular approach.  As long as we resist editor wars, it may be useful.

If reStructuredText is going to gain popularity in the Python developers
community, maybe we should bet in that direction, and prefer the conventions
it proposes for Python-dev summaries and other simple documents.  The bet to
be taken, here, is that our editors and tools would eventually better support
reST, or be supplemented with a dependable set of programs to do so.

On the other hand, it seems that not everybody is comfortable with reST yet,
this might be a problem if there is strong resistance.  For one, I rather
liked what I saw so far, and without knowing how much time or effort it would
take before I use reST fluently, I would probably be happy to share the bet!

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard