Posted by Curtis on 12/06/05 01:36

Andy Dingley wrote:
> On Sun, 4 Dec 2005 17:06:26 -0800, "Curtis"
<nospam@nohow.not> wrote:
>
>> If we could have found something that did what we wanted
the
>> way we wanted to do it, we would not have bothered.
Textile
>> and Markdown came a bit closer than BBCode, but...
>
> So what's wrong with HTML, DocBook or TEI ?

Andy, perhaps you didn't read my original post.

Nothing is wrong with HTML, but it is far too verbose for
our purposes. My OP suggests why we're after something
different.

> Now pardon a possibly rude suggestion here, but if you're
having to
> ask what "id" and "class" are all about, you're not the
most expert
> authority on text encoding and the chances are that you're
missing
> something that already exists.

Ignorance in one area implies nothing about judgment in
other areas. Feel free to read the OP and offer specific
suggestions, though.

> There's also the question of synergy. Now this is a hugely
abused
> term, to the point of meaninglessness, but Bucky Fuller
was right
> about it. There's a _huge_ synergy to using pre-existing
tools and
> formats rather than inventing your own.

It's a grand idea in principle. In practice, however,
existing software "tools" often turn out to be
garbage--bloated, pathetically documented, so badly written
that making it work right takes far more effort than writing
the same functionality from scratch. Finding a really good
third-party add-on package often involves more work than
DIY, sadly.

> Are you _really_ sure that
> inventing another new format is sufficiently better, and
the other
> pre-exisiting choices so limited, that you're actually
going to be
> better off doing it this way?

Fair question. We may well have missed something, as we only
looked at and tested a dozen or so. (That, by the way, took
nearly as long as writing ~1000 lines of PHP code to produce
Marx.) In any event, the question is certainly one we asked
ourselves, and the fact that we wrote the program is our
answer, for better or worse. The horse is out of the barn.

--

Curtis

Visit We the Thinking
www.wethethinking.com
An online magazine/forum
devoted to ideas.

[Back to original message]