On Fri, Dec 13, 2013 at 02:12:48PM +0100, Paul Onyschuk wrote: > Plain text is even more human friendly. Email composition is based on > conventions, not syntax - quotes, references etc. For many thing it > is good enough.
For conversations yes. However those 'mini "markup"' languages allow for at least somethat decent conversion to html andsother formats, whichs is quite usefull. I think they take quite good middle ground. No to detailed and rigorious as to be nasty for people (even non technical) to write in. But still with some rules/conventions to allow machines do some rudimentary parsing and rendering/conversion. > Few words on roff. I you stick to man, mdoc and ms macros and avoid > low-level roff stuff, it is quite nice format. On the first look it is > quite alien, but it originated on Unix and that shows off. Sed, > awk, grep and other standard tools work great with sane roff > document: you can stick to the oneliners (I don't think that this can > be said about any other document format). Well I do not have much experience with them, but even looking at source of suckless tools man pages they are less pleasant to look at than for example Markdown, though admittedly not too scary ether and one can decipher stuff. Still Markdown reads more comforatably since it has some "plain" formatting in plain text.
