[Doc-SIG] Where to go from here

[Edward D. Loper]

Guido's input has raised some questions about whether we're going
in the right direction...  But he's made it clear that he'll keep
an open mind, and seriously consider any real specs we come up with.
So I propose we do the following:

    - continue trying to come up with a concrete, formal spec
    - drop the idea of maintaining compatibility with STNG, for
      now.  Once STNG sees how much cooler our markup language
      is, we can convert them. ;)  Maybe we should even come up
      with a new name, so that other people who have become
      embittered with STclassic won't take it out on us. :)
    - STminus will focus purely on coming up with a formal description,
      and drop its goals of unifying STNG/STpy.
    - Focus on the goal of making a *real* markup language that is
      *lightweight* and simple to read/write.
    - Once we have a real specification (hopefully in a couple
      weeks), we can talk to Guido/others about whether it's
      acceptable.  It's unreasonable to expect Guido to make
      judgements when the ST stuff is in the state of flux it's
      in now.

Dropping STNG compatibility will allow us to consider a number
of options that I hadn't brought up before..  For example, I think
we might want to replace '--' with '---' as the description list
indicator, since people *do* use '--' in text (I know I do, and
apparently Guido does too).  And I think we should drop 'o' as
a bullet character.  etc..

As for colorization, java-mode does just fine colorizing javadoc
comments, so I don't see how it's a problem *in principle*, just
a problem of someone figuring out what to tell emacs (I'm sure
emacs could be told to colorize tripple-quoted-strings correctly
if someone really wanted to figure out how to.. I've just been
using the work-around of backslashing all double quotes in 
tripple-quoted-strings, which doesn't affect their value, and 
makes them colorize correctly)

-Edward