Fwd: atx

From: Aaron Swartz <me@aaronsw.com>
Date: Tue Feb 4, 2003  10:11:04  AM America/Chicago
To: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@mysterylights.com>
Subject: Re: atx

Sean B. Palmer wrote:
> * What's its reason for being? Do you have any particular use cases in
> mind for it, e.g. as a Wiki format?

I plan to use it so I never have to write HTML again. It should also be 
forward-compatible to whatever Advanced XHTML 5.0 idiocy the W3C comes 
up with

> * s/range/en-dash/

Tx, fxd.

> what I mean is, are there any character escapes?

It hasn't come up yet it practice. If you really need them, suggest a 
syntax.

> * Can one cite references for blockquotes?

No, because no browsers support it.

> * I don't think cramming hypertext into it is a good idea. URIs should
> be invisible where possible anyway.

Well, you have to include them somehow.

> And text/plain isn't meant to have formatting characters spewed 
> through it: that's part of the defintion of text/plain.

Who said it was text/plain?

> I want to use features such as <sec> in XHTML 2.0, and it's difficult 
> to do that in text

Can't it be implied with blank #+ lines?

> And all you're doing really is taking some structural bits of HTML and 
> bunging them into an inferior format.

On what basis is it inferior? It seems superior to me in every way. 
It's wysywyg, but it works in your favorite editor. It's easy to write 
and easy to read. You can use diff and such on it and send it to your 
editors for direct proofreading, instead of translating to another 
language and translating back.

> If you're going to do that, you might as well propose a strict subset 
> of HTML 4.01.

Why? SGML is fundamentally broken.

> Sigh. Also, I presume you've got Python code for converting atx to
> HTML: could you link that from /2002/atx/intro?

Sure, done.

> Oh, and the atx form seems to have disappeared since you put the 
> /2002/atx/ folder
> up. Unless I imagined it.

Fxd.

> Oh, and this is invalid XML, btw:
> http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/unicode.xml

Tx, fxd.

> 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...

Why does atx suck? Here's the master plan:

    atx for documents
+ rdf (n3) for data
= no more XML! (bwahaha)

-- 
Aaron Swartz [http://www.aaronsw.com/]

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 11:15:37 UTC