On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 9:56 AM, John MacFarlane <j...@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> > I think that the abstract is a fine case. Although one *could* handle > it the way you suggest, by having the metadata specify a section > of the document to use as the abstract, I don't see the advantage of > that. It is natural distinguish between the body text, which is *always* > part > of the produced document, whether a fragment or a standalone document is > being > produced, and regardless of the format or template used, and the metadata, > which sometimes appear in the produced document, depending on one's > purposes, > and which appear differently in different formats. Once you make this > distinction, the abstract clearly falls on the side of the metadata. > > In that case, you're talking about metadata in the more general sense - like link definitions, footnotes, and other constructs that are currently treated as a special case in markdown. I'm all for having a special syntax for defining the abstract, as long as the author doesn't have to worry about any escaping conventions and can just write it like he/she would any other regular markdown content. > Other cases: > > * bibliographic data for the document itself, which you might want > to print in some presentations but not others > * revision history > * tags > * bibliography entries used in the document > * settings for things like default stylesheets > > Point taken, most of these are good cases for supporting structured content, but not formattable/markdown content, right? > Currently you need to specify the bibliography database on the > command line as well (it can be bibtex, endnote, or any number > of other formats). Ideally, though, the document itself should > specify where its bibliographical entries are coming from. > This could just be a file path, but if you want the document to > be truly portable, it would be nice to be able to include the structured > bibliography entries themselves in metadata at the end of the document. > This could be done easily with a data description language as > powerful as lua/yaml/json. > Absolutely - but the (possibly unattainable) ideal would be a situation where tools and experts can specify complex structured metadata, and regular joe can change his title, author, and other basic/simple values and lists, specifying values that contain apostrophes, commas and other natural punctuation, wihout blowing anything up in the process. As soon as he needs to specify/modify something that contains structure (or even something multi-line?) it seems fair that he should have to use a tool or do some research on the standard (esp. as most if not all of the structured-data use cases relate to tools already). My concern with a pure-lua/yaml/json metadata format is that it requires specialized knowledge (not related to the existing markdown standards/experience) on the part of the user for even the most trivial changes to the simplest fields - *especially* if structured/markdown content such as the abstract is placed in a metadata field!
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