Re: atx

> 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

Well, I can certainly support the general reasoning there, but...

* Why not use an HTML WYSIWYG editor? Well, except for the fact that
there isn't a decent one in existence yet, that I know of. Sigh: it'd
be such a timesaver for me (and seemingly you, too) if someone came up
with a decent HTML editor.
* Hopefully, > XHTML 1.1 won't be widely enough deployed to be a
bother--considering in advance that it's junk, which is a cynical
point of view to take, but if the current XHTML 2 drafts are anything
to go by...

Heh, but did you see the XHTML 2 Considered Harmful thread?

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Jan/0123

Good ol' Tantek.

[...]
> > 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.

I guess that I could embed UTF-8 encoded unicode characters...

> > * Can one cite references for blockquotes?
>
> No, because no browsers support it.

So the design manifesto for atx contains something like "ignore one of
the few good bits of good semantic design in HTML just because it's
not supported by browsers yet"? You could always have the engine
convert the blockquote citation format into something that browsers
*can* pick up on, like a hyperlink just under the blockquote.

> > URIs should be invisible where possible anyway.
>
> Well, you have to include them somehow.

Right... I was just thinking along different lines, I guess.

> > 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?

"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8"
--HEAD http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro.atx

> > 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?

Not sure what you mean by blank #+ lines. Just in case we're talking
past each other, I meant something like this:-

|<sec>
|   <hd>Blargh</hd>
|   <par>some crap</par>
|     |<sec>
|     |  <hd>Sub-Blargh</hd>
|     |  <par>More crap.</par>
|     |</sec>
|   <par>more crap in the original level</par>
|</sec>

Good for sidenotes; usually styled with a CSS border-left.

> > 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. [reasons for its superiority]

Well, for a start, if you're generally serving it as HTML, you need to
keep the atx source up to date with the generated HTML version. So the
steps for creating a document are: write atx, save atx, convert
atx--and I know from experience that I can't be bothered to convert
source and constantly maintain two files for one document. It always
feels to be like a waste of drive space to have two such similar files
next to one another...

> > If you're going to do that, you might as well propose a
> > strict subset of HTML 4.01.
>
> Why? SGML is fundamentally broken.

Well, HTML has always been a pseudo-application of SGML anyway. It's
kinda a shame that Tim made it look like SGML; no one wanted or needed
that, anyway. All the early HTML code was done from scratch, it seems:
and rightfully so. But whatever, the point is that *HTML* is very
widely deployed, and that it's possible to create a nice subset of
HTML 4.01 with stuff like SHORTTAG YES and all the presentational crap
quietly erased that'll be just about usuable in all Web browsers to
come for decades.

> [Lots of fixes snipped; thanks.]
>
> > It wouldn't be so bad if there was a format that
> > didn't really, really suck...
>
> Why does atx suck?

Well, I didn't really mean that atx sucks yet... I was just thinking
of text/HTML/XML+CSS. I'm not all that sure about atx yet since I
haven't used it.

> Here's the master plan:
>
>     atx for documents
> + rdf (n3) for data
> = no more XML! (bwahaha)

Well, HTML 4.01 isn't XML either :-) I like the conclusion, but I
think that if you're going to the trouble of deploying a whole new
language, you might as well make it really decent, but you seem to
have just taken bits of structural HTML and made them human readable.
Hmm. I suppose I was just thinking that if you're going to deploy
something new, you might as well make it semantically rich, but that'd
require deploying a rendering engine, which ain't gonna happen. It's
such a shame that XML sucks, because the underlying
power-to-the-people principle is otherwise pretty good.

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

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 13:56:25 UTC