On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 04:35:01PM +0200, Daniel Clemente wrote: > Hi, > I find this very interesting. Some ideas: > > - Maybe it could provide access not only to the headlines, but to > the headlines of the headlines, and of their headlines, etc. In > fact, access to the whole tree. This would allow batch processing > of any contents.
Absolutely - that was a core part of the intent of my proposal; I probably didn't make that clear enough. > As a plus, each header would get a path (like XPath in XML, or DOM > in XHTML) and would be addressable. Maybe useful for links. Whilst borrowing some of the XPath syntax would be an extremely cool way of making content addressable, I do think it's a nice-to-have which is separate to having an iteration API. Maybe later on the API could be extended to only apply to subtrees matching an XPath-like query, but that really would be icing on the cake. I feel that the biggest wins (and very big too, IMHO) would come from a simple iteration API. > - An API would be useful not only to generate reports, etc. like in your > examples, but also to execute actions on each header; for instance „export“ > each header, „delete“ it, ... (And now with latest version, each header can > have different export options) Agreed - it would open up many options for batch processing as well as the reporting examples I gave before. I would personally use it to convert some of my tags into properties. For instance I have tags like 'sub60', 'sub2' to indicate that I estimate a task will take 60 minutes or 2 hours maximum, respectively. They could be converted into the effort estimation property. > - Of course, this is already possible by going through the file looking for > headers; an API would make iteration easier, like with mapcar Yes. There will be many intricacies involved in iteration, and probably only Carsten knows them all - without an API we would individually be reinventing the same wheel over and over ... badly. _______________________________________________ Emacs-orgmode mailing list Remember: use `Reply All' to send replies to the list. Emacs-orgmode@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-orgmode
