[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