[Doc-SIG] lightweight markup: bullets

[Tim Peters]

[Edward D. Loper, on L<...> for list items]
> Perhaps.  The reason that I didn't do that is that the use of <...> or
> L<...> for bullets is really very different from the use of X<...> for
> coloring.

It's barely different at all to me:  it's markup, as opposed to not markup,
and that's the *primary* distinction that needs to be learned.  You
overburden my biological pattern-recognition engine if I have to learn N
different lexical conventions for N different categories of markup.

> X<...> coloring is something that happens within a paragraph.
> L<...> is a structuring primitive..  For example, you can't say::
>
>    This makes L<no> sense.
>
> But you can say::
>
>    This I<does> make sense.

So L<whatever> has to appear at the start of a line.  Fine:  additional
constraints on specific X<...> thingies are easy to live with.

> ...
> The main reason for not just using something established like XML or
> LaTeX is that they're too complex/ugly.  There's no point in having a
> new markup language if it's also complex/ugly.. :) So I'd like to keep
> this markup language as simple and clean as possible.

I've got no particular use for list markup at all, but since people will
insist that it's necessary, it's simpler and cleaner to reuse one lexical
gimmick whenever it suffices to get the job done.  WRT beauty,

   <1>

and

   L<1>

are *both* "ugly", but at least the latter is ugly in exactly the same way
that

   E<beautiful>

is uglier than

   *beautiful*

Occam's Beautifier suggests that new varieties of ugliness not be multiplied
beyond necessity <wink>.