[Doc-SIG] Alternative inline markup

[Alan Jaffray]

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Moore, Paul wrote:
> My personal goal is to get it seen as a "normal mindset" for people who want
> to add a little structure to their plain text writing - wherever that may be.

We're on the same page here.  In fact, that's exactly how I explained it
to a coworker yesterday.  He asked "so this'll make it easier to mark up
stuff we send around in email to put it on the intranet?"  I replied
"Ideally, you shouldn't have to mark it up at all!  It's simple enough
that you should be able to just use it in everyday messages and process
them as is, I'm already doing that on one of my mailing lists."  He
thought that was nifty. :-)

I realize that what I'm suggesting sounds more complicated.  However, 
that's largely because I"m explaining it relative to the current spec,
not from scratch.  I'm keeping in mind "does this make it easier or
more difficult to explain how to use the language in under two minutes"
(or under 40 lines of email) because I'm going to have to do just that.
I don't think I'm compromising that goal; if anything what I'm suggesting
brings us *closer*.

> I want a full implementation **now**. (And if I don't get one, I'll thcream
> and thcream until I'm thick.

Hell, me too. :)  I'm already writing rST and converting it to XML and HTML,
and I'm writing a Zope product akin to the existing STXDocument to use rST
in Zope without explicitly invoking converters.  I'm planning to train
people on it and start having them use it by next *week*.  (Freeze or
no freeze - if the spec changes on me after that, well, I'll suffer.)

> This went on too long. But I'm convinced - we should freeze the design now,
> and work on implementation. We can't hit a moving target. (At the very
> least, the DOM needs to be frozen so that work on output has a firm
> basis...)

Can we at least add support for inline nested markup to the DOM before
freezing, even if the current parser doesn't support it, so those of us
who want to add it can do so without breaking everything in existence?
Surely that wouldn't be too difficult.

Alan