reStructured Text - suitable for non-documentation?

[Florian Schulze]

On Mon, 02 Jun 2003 02:31:44 GMT, Ben Finney <bignose-hates-spam at and-zip- 
does-too.com.au> wrote:

> Howdy all,
>
> I'm engaged on a low-priority, long-term project to "refactor" my web
> pages.  I don't want the content in a database; I'm much more
> comfortable editing text files.  However, I do want content to be
> completely separate from presentation markup or code.
>
> So I've been investigating the various plain-text markup schemes
> available.  I.e., the ones where the idea is that the source be
> reasonably readable as a plain-text document, and existing plain-text
> "markup" conventions be leveraged as much as possible.  The Wiki
> schemes, the BB schemes, et al are all in this group.  None of them are
> particularly satisfactory though.
>
> My latest investigation is of reStructured Text, the proposed docutil
> markup scheme:
>
> <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html>
>
> This seems a well thought out scheme, with coverage of most of the
> things I want to do in web pages.
>
> So, some questions:
>
> Who is using reStructured Text actively?
> Who's using it for things other than Python documentation?
> How applicable do you think it is for non-documentation text?
> Are there non-Python tools for processing it (preferably PHP)?
> Am I insane for even thinking of such a thing?
> Are there better alternatives (i.e. ones specifically designed for
> marking up web page content in plain text)?
>

I want to do exactly the same. I already started to use it to some extend 
and for me it works well. I use rst2html from the docutils sandbox and I 
rewrote my own version of ht2html to better suite my needs. The website 
isn't online yet, but it looks very promising. If you are interested, I can 
send you an example. I have to do one anyway, because I want to show it to 
a friend. I also want to include template functionality. The goal is to 
move all the things that can be postprocessed to my local machine. Before I 
did much stuff in PHP, but that isn't really needed as it's not dynamic.

Florian