> > Complain about Markdown all you will, and use weird-arse corner cases to > show it’s Bad, but GFM can handle a lot of everyday text.
Markdown has only one feature: readability. Prove me wrong. On Sun, 27 Sep 2020 at 14:14, Larry Kollar <larry.kol...@me.com> wrote: > A little late to the party, but I do have some experience here. > > > I assume the reference to Docbook, which might indeed capsize > > like an overweight freighter, but XML is such a simple and robust > > form of structuring documents that it's going to outlast us all. > > I’m not going to pronounce Docbook dead, but open-source projects > that use it (or Texinfo) have accidentally erected a barrier to entry for > people who want to contribute to the documentation. They would be > much better served by adopting Lightweight DITA, which can ingest > HTML5 and Github-Flavored Markdown alongside DITA XML (and > convert any type to any other type). Complain about Markdown all you > will, and use weird-arse corner cases to show it’s Bad, but GFM can > handle a lot of everyday text. > > XML is a stripped-down form of SGML. Much of what was stripped > involved conveniences for people working directly with the markup. > They may as well have stripped entities as well, because I’ve never > seen them actually used (most XML-based markup languages have > their own methods of defining and using variables). Yes, JSON and > CSV (and Markdown, for that matter) are a lot easier to output from > an awk script… but for input, there are several decent XML parsers > for awk while TSV/CSV/JSON parsers have severe limitations. I had > to learn enough Python to deal with a couple of work projects that > involved CSV and JSON input. > > OK, let’s move to *roff for a moment. It can do most of the things > that DITA advocates tout: reusable topics, conditionals, variables, > insertions, and so forth (you can get a *lot* of mileage out of .so). > Most of the -ms macros that come before the first .LP or .NH are > considered book metadata in DITA, so metadata is covered. What > *roff doesn’t do is produce usable HTML output. Yet. > > Yeah, XSLT sucks like pure vacuum. All that’s keeping it alive is the > lack of a decent open-source (or even reasonably-priced) CSS3 > processor. If one becomes available, you’ll see people abandoning > XSLT as fast as they can. > > — Larry >
