[Doc-SIG] References in the same line as the target text

Simon Budig Simon.Budig@unix-ag.org
Wed, 3 Jul 2002 00:33:11 +0200


David Goodger (goodger@users.sourceforge.net) wrote:
> It comes down to this: the top goal of reStructuredText is to be as readable
> in plaintext (source) form as in processed form.  An important market for
> this is (will be) Python docstrings.  You and Simon seem not so interested
> in the plaintext readability issue; it's the processed output which is most
> important.

Yes, this is an important point, but easy edit-ablity (?) is also very
important. There are enough complicated markup languages out there,
and reST is the easiest I have came across (with the exception of
some other textual markup languages that fail to have some kind of
sane specification).

It is in my eyes a great pity that you seem to have a tendency to 
limit reST to the docstring-scope. I in your place would not have
merged reST and the DPS, because I think of them as two different things
(I have to admit that I did not look too deeply in the DPS stuff, but
extracting docstrings seems unrelated to process reST text to me).

I think that there really is a need for a simple markup language that
can be used by - for example - a secretary to maintain a simple Website.
HTML fails the "understandable to non-geek-guys"-test, GUI-tools are known
to produce crappy HTML code when used by non-experts.

reST really could fill a gap here.

Bye,
        Simon

-- 
      Simon.Budig@unix-ag.org       http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/