[Doc-SIG] Alternative inline markup

Alan Jaffray jaffray@pobox.com
Thu, 8 Nov 2001 14:48:08 -0500 (EST)


On Thu, 8 Nov 2001, Moore, Paul wrote:
> The general feeling seems to be that nesting is *not* worth adding. It's
> interesting to note that in HTML, <a> elements *don't* nest - so prior art
> here says that nesting isn't useful for links.

Uh, that's not how I read the `HTML4 DTD`__ ... ::

    <!ELEMENT A - - (%inline;)* -(A)       -- anchor -->
    <!ENTITY % inline "#PCDATA | %fontstyle; | %phrase; | %special; | %formctrl;">
    <!ENTITY % special "A | IMG | OBJECT | BR | SCRIPT | MAP | Q | SUB | SUP | SPAN | BDO">

__ http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#edef-A

> Apologies if I've misinterpreted what you propose - hopefully, the
> misinterpretation is valuable in pointing out where you are still not
> getting your point across :-)

Well, it's become clear that I need to provide much stronger arguments
for why richer inline markup is important.  I feel pretty strongly that
this is something that will come to bite us later, and not very much
later, if we want rST to thrive as a general markup.  I have use for 
it now, and I have relatively simple applications and have barely
started to use the language.

And yeah, it can be added later, but I *really* don't want to head down
the road of writing reStructuredTextWithNesting while someone else writes
reStructuredTextWithNestingDoneSomewhatDifferent and someone else writing
reStructuredTextWithChocolateSprinkles and the whole incompatible 
dialect-proliferation fiasco that STX has gotten itself into.

Long email with more examples coming soon, I suppose.

Alan