Re: atx

> 1. There aren't any.
> 2. People are very attached to their text editors.
> 3. Text editors are far more common than WYSIWYG editors.
> 4. WYSIWYG editors are less natural than atx.
> 5. WYSIWYG editors can't be used with other Unix tools.
>
> atx solves all of these problems, and I don't think it introduces
any
> new ones. (Can you think of any it does?)

Honestly? No. Though if there were a decent WYSIWYG editor around, I
think that only item 5 on your list above would be a problem. And I'm
not even sure why that's a problem: there's not really much difference
'twixt "<h1>Blargh</h1>" and "# Blargh" except that the latter is
easier to type. I don't see why diff should care, but you've probably
got specific examples in mind that I haven't thought about. (No need
to supply them.)

> Alright, alright. To be honest I was considering it.
> [...]
>    mailboxes to a sensible new format?
> (from Internet mail message header format:
http://cr.yp.to/immhf.html)

Whoo! Yep, that's a good syntax, too. Puts one in mind of chumpy's
[title|URI] syntax.

Whilst I'm on the "[]" syntax subject, I'd just like to say that if I
were using atx, I'd certainly prefer using {} for links instead of []
since I commonly use [] for interpolations. That's tripped me up on
chumpy a couple of times when I've wanted to use interpolations and
they've been interpreted as links.

[...]
> Oh, I see. Hm. I guess we could do indentation.

Feature bloat! :-)

> It's easy to have Apache do it for you, or just generate it
> on the fly if there's not much load.

I maintain a lot of HTML files for just me, and I don't tend to use
Apache to serve them up. Could add a menu function to update them, I
suppose. But it's a PITA... oh, or perhaps I could dig up my old
Python text editor and have it auto save as HTML. Heh, that'd be
rather cool: open HTML as atx if it can, and then save it as HTML
again.

Would you believe that I stopped using that editor because the cursor
blink rate was a little too high? That's pretty silly now that I think
about it: it had some good features (could save via FTP, for one;
could easily have added HTTP PUT). But man, that cursor was annoying.
I don't think that TkInter will let one change it.

> [...] HTML _readers_ are widely deployed.

"Google - Searching 3,083,324,652 web pages"
--http://www.google.com/

Dunno what percentage of those are HTML, but still...

> > it's possible to create a nice subset of HTML 4.01 with stuff
> > like SHORTTAG YES
>
> I'm sorry, but I'm not really interested in writing another <p>
> or </blockquote>. I'll have my computer do it for me.

I'd still prefer WYSIWYG. A really good editor would even be able to
map "###" to the command for inserting an <h3>, for example (hey, now
there's an Amaya feature request in the making!).

> >> = no more XML! (bwahaha)
> > Well, HTML 4.01 isn't XML either :-)
>
> Close enough for RSI.

WYSIWYG!

[...]
> > you might as well make it semantically rich, but that'd require
> > deploying a rendering engine,
>
> Well, like XSL-FOs, you can render to a non-semantic language
> to avoid redeploying.

Ew. If you render headings as "big text" and lose the information that
they're headings, how do you expect people to be able to use an
Opera-esque header skipping function, or an overview script? XSL-FOs
should only be sent if requested. If a decent generic hypermedia
language were deployed, I hope that no one in their right minds would
request text/html.

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

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 2003 21:40:44 UTC