[Doc-SIG] Proposal for indented sections in reStructuredText

[Wolfgang Lipp]

>From: Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com>
>Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 06:59:28 -0400
>
>> Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com> wrote:
>Very funny, but not a reasonable argument.  Presenting program source
>code has a history of about 50 years, and indentation has been part of
>the presentation tradition for about 40 of those.  Plain text however,
>has been around for, oh, 30 centuries, and I am as skeptical of this
>"innovation" as I am of many other "improvements" to text presentation
>that have been proposed by computer geeks.

you don't like *this*?


>other way.  For text, the length of sections (often more than a page)
>mean that the human reader isn't very good at keeping track of
>indentation levels.  I bet you've been confused once or twice in your
>life by a book where a significant indent coincided by a page break.
>So we scan for the section headers to discern the section structure.

>My conclusion: using indentation to discern section structure in text
>would be as much giving in to the computer (which has no problem
>keeping track of indents over many pages) as is using braces to
>discern block structure in code.

I'd conclude: indentation for text is not much different 
from using braces in text: easy for the machine, difficult 
for the human... ;-) apart from that, I've often been puzzled with
indentations on-the-pagebreak -- but in my editor, there are 
no pages. As for indented text, I can, at least, *guess* the
structural level locally by assessing the whitespace to the 
left; with mark-up-only, I have to scroll up in long texts 
seeking the last heading(s) (plural in case of free-form 
underline style) to find out (and that is something computers
are much better in than I am).


>> text. I agree. If a majority turns out to be in favour of a more liberal 
>> solution that allows more than one way, would that beat TSBOOWTDI, or is 
>> TSBOOWTDI even above that?
>
>Sure, but I would doubt a majority of votes in this forum, where geeks
>are overrepresented.

What kind of voting is the custom, then? (Got to find out, I guess).


Thanks for the reply, I enjoyed reading it.

-Wolf