[Doc-SIG] formalizing StructuredText

[Edward D. Loper]

> Well, prepare to be well miffed (ST has never supported differing
> starting and ending quotes). So hey.

Although now we have [...] (or "..."[...] or "...":[...] or whatever
it really is).

> It should (eventually) in the '"..."' text, but not in the URL itself.
> This is actually a good reason to forbid apostrophe in URLs, 

Of course, you can't reasonably forbid '#' in URLs, so you'll have 
to put URL recognition before inline recognition *anyway*.. :)

> and may
> mean I need to put the URL recognition *before* literal recognition -
> no, that won't work, 'cos then I couldn't say
> 
> 	'http://www.literal.org/'
> 
> Hmm. This is a no-win situation, I'm afraid. Ah - no it's not, because
> I'm requiring the user to escape spaces in a URL, and not to end with
> "funny" characters, so it *should* actually come out in the wash - we'll
> need to make some careful test cases...

I think there's a serious problem here if we are allowing URLs to 
appear in arbitrary places.  For example, consider::

    foo://no#good bar://parse#for this.

It seems perfectly reasonable for #good bar...# to be a literal..
But then it also seems reasonable for those to be urls..
Possible ways out:

   1. Say that the opening '#' must have whitespace to its left,
      and the closing '#' must have whitespace to its right.  Of
      course, that forbids saying things like #Object#s, but I
      guess I could live with that
   2. Use some special demarkation for URLs!  :)  I'm for this,
      but am worried about trying to convince the STNG people,
      esp. if we're proposing using <..>.. Since they're currently
      saying that such things should be ignored.  Of course, they're
      clearly wrong on that point, too, but it means that I'll have
      to argue 2 different points at once. :)  Also, if we do this,
      we have to be sure to stress in the PEP/ST docs that math
      must go in literals like: 'x*y>z'.  (Of course, we'll probably
      want to stress that anyway).

Are there any objections in principle for using <...> to delimit
URLs?  (Other than that it will be hard to convince STNG people).
If not, I think we should start trying to convince STNG people to
use <...> for URLs, and to give up on ignoring <...> tokens.

-Edward