atx

[Regarding http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro]

I've just a few comments:-

* What's its reason for being? Do you have any particular use cases in
mind for it, e.g. as a Wiki format?
* s/range/en-dash/
* What if I want to put two em-dashes in succession (it's a valid
scenario: used for when people get cut off in mid----)? It'll be
interpreted as en-dash and a hyphen, which is not what I want. Same
for other characters: what I mean is, are there any character escapes?
* Can one cite references for blockquotes?
* I don't think cramming hypertext into it is a good idea. URIs should
be invisible where possible anyway. And text/plain isn't meant to have
formatting characters spewed through it: that's part of the defintion
of text/plain. If you're using atx as a source for transformations to
HTML etc.--which appears to be its only use unless you're creating
some sort of GUI for it--then you ought to register a media type for
it.

Overall, I'm not sure that atx is a good idea. That's a very odd thing
for me to say because for months I've been puzzling over "plain text"
formats such as this. I want to use features such as <sec> in XHTML
2.0, and it's difficult to do that in text (well, not that
difficult--just use tabs--but it looks horrid). And all you're doing
really is taking some structural bits of HTML and bunging them into an
inferior format. If you're going to do that, you might as well propose
a strict subset of HTML 4.01. Actually, I'd really like the W3C to do
that: come up with an SGML based subset of HTML 4.01 that's something
like XHTML Basic, but with a load of stuff fixed. It wouldn't even be
difficult to develop.

Sigh. Also, I presume you've got Python code for converting atx to
HTML: could you link that from /2002/atx/intro? Cheers. Oh, and the
atx form seems to have disappeared since you put the /2002/atx/ folder
up. Unless I imagined it.

Oh, and this is invalid XML, btw:
http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/unicode.xml Can't have element or
attribute names matching "(?i)^xml", except for those specifically
reserved by the XML specifications.

Hmph. Your site is a good reason for switching to Mozilla, too. Damn
IE and it's crappy CSS implementation.

I'm seriously considering an All Web Formats Considered Harmful sort
of rant. Time to start afresh, perhaps. It wouldn't be so bad if there
was a format that didn't really, really suck... but we've got HTML
(haha), text, (hahaha), and XML+CSS (bwahahaha). Oh well.

--
Sean B. Palmer, <http://purl.org/net/sbp/>
"phenomicity by the bucketful" - http://miscoranda.com/

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 07:32:34 UTC