[Doc-SIG] Re: [Docutils-develop] master plan for interpreted text?

[Alexander Schmolck]

David Goodger <goodger@python.org> writes:

> * emphasis
> * foreign words
> * special terminology & technical terms
> * words used as words
> * letters as letters
> * musical dynamics (pianissimo as italic "pp" etc.)
> * letters indicating ryme schemes (as "aabba" for a limerick)
> 
> All of these are mapped to italics.  Should we have roles for each of
> them?  Even if we combine closely-related cases (words as words &
> letters as letters; musical dynamics as a case of foreign words), we
> have 4 or 5 cases here.  DocBook has dozens more inline elements.  How
> far should we go?

-1

Of all the possible roles above only terminology (and/or acronyms) would seem
to potentially profit from being specifically semantically tagged as such. Who
is going to write a reST document in which he needs to process "musical
dynamics" or "letters indicating ryme schemes" separately from emphasized
text? If the need really arises then the user can always specify his own role
tags.

> The to-do list has this item: add a runtime setting (directive and/or
> command-line option) to set the default role of interpreted text.
> I.E., map "`" to something.  Should we have a directive to map other
> inline markup (i.e., "*" & "**", maybe even "``") to arbitrary inline
> element types?

+1 Obviously these should only be remapped to related element types
(i.e. self-defined ones for special applications), but since the number of
available lightweight markup elements is severely limited and readability of
reST documents is an important goal, allowing the user the option to leverage
these for his own purposes seems like a good thing to me.

alex