In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Alan Kennedy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >However, I'm torn on whether to use ReST for textual content. On the one >hand, it's looks pretty comprehensive and solidly implemented. But OTOH, >I'm concerned about complexity: I don't want to commit to ReST if it's >going to become a lot of hard work or highly-inefficient when I really >need to use it "in anger". > > From what I've seen, pretty much every textual markup targetted for web >content, e.g. wiki markup, seems to have grown/evolved organically, >meaning that it is either underpowered or overpowered, full of special >cases, doesn't have a meaningful object model, etc.
My perception is that reST is a lot like Python itself: it's easy to hit the ground running, particularly if you restrict yourself to a specific subset of featuers. It does give you a fair amount of power, and some things are difficult or impossible. Note that reST was/is *not* specifically aimed at web content. Several people have used it for writing books; some people are using it instead of PowerPoint. >So, I'm hoping that the learned folks here might be able to give me some >pointers to a markup language that has the following characteristics > >1. Is straightforward for non-technical users to use, i.e. can be >(mostly) explained in a two to three page document which is >comprehensible to anyone who has ever used a simple word-processor or >text-editor. > >2. Allows a wide variety of content semantics to be represented, e.g. >headings, footnotes, sub/superscript, links, etc, etc. These two criteria seem to be in opposition. I certainly wouldn't expect a three-page document to explain all these features, not for non-technical users. reST fits both these criteria, but only for a selected subset of featuers. -- Aahz ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "19. A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing." --Alan Perlis -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list