Textual markup languages (was Re: What YAML engine do you use?)

[Aahz]

In article <UFyKd.46554$Z14.29218 at news.indigo.ie>,
Alan Kennedy  <alanmk at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I think that is where a lot of markup languages fall down, in that they 
>end trying to develop a sophisticated metadata model that can capture 
>that kind of information, and re-engineering the markup to support it. 
>This co-evolution of the markup and model can go horribly awry, if the 
>designers are inexperienced or don't know where they're headed.

Ayup.  Fortunately, David Goodger (the primary architect of reST) has
plenty of experience in this area; reST was written as a reaction to the,
er, organic nature of some other experiments.  Nobody involved with the
reST project claims it's perfect, but most of us do think we've made
good tradeoffs (just like Python ;-).  Like Guido, David's also pretty
comfortable saying "no"....

One more thing: reST does make it fairly easy to write "self-documenting"
forms -- give your users boilerplate plus some simple instructions, and
they should find it very easy to write their content.  (I'm particularly
referring to using bibliographic fields in reST -- that's easier to do
with boilerplate than explain how to do correctly.)


The one thing I forgot to mention in my first post is that the biggest
downside to reST for non-technical users is that it's possible to write
incorrect documents.  With a GUI interface, you can write butt-ugly junk,
but it'll never generate a syntax error.  However, given your
requirements, it sounds more like you're using "non-technical" to mean
"not computer experts" -- those people are probably more likely to feel
comfortable with getting error messages.
-- 
Aahz (aahz at pythoncraft.com)           <*>         http://www.pythoncraft.com/

"19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming,
is not worth knowing."  --Alan Perlis