Hi,
I share my personal views on this below.
John Wiegley <jwieg...@gmail.com> writes:
>>>>>> John Wiegley <jo...@gnu.org> writes:
>
>> I spoke to Nicolas directly and he mentioned that a goal for syntax
>> regularity is to make it possible to reliably read and manipulate Org files
>> outside of Emacs.
>>
>> For this I *am* willing to give up order independence of PROPERTIES. Having
>> a customization option would needlessly increases the number of
>> possibilities external processors must consider, and so I retract my
>> request.
>
> I've had time this weekend to rethink my feature request, and I realized that
> even machine-friendly formatting is something I should be able to give up, to
> have an Org that works better for me.
>
> What has always made Org great (to me) is that it's a rather "light" overlay
> on a plain old text file. What structure it does enforce -- say, the actual
> syntax of drawers -- has always felt fairly "fluid".
>
> Lately there seems to be a push to sacrifice some of this freedom in order to
> gain efficiency and regularity. I imagine this is for the benefit of machine
> parsers; but what if one doesn't use any machine parsers? Org never asked me
> to give up flexibility for unknown benefits before.
This is one concern. Another concern is adhere to the "Org syntax", which
I guess is what you mean by regularity.
There are other implementations of Org. For instance, Github and Gitlab
display Org files via org-ruby (AFAIK). If the claim was, that there is a
strong desire to formalize and stick to the Org syntax, I would agree.
Furthermore, I would claim this is a good thing.
http://orgmode.org/worg/dev/org-syntax.html#Property_Drawers
An alternative is a freer take on syntax, such as how MD has evolved,
which IMO is a bit annoying.
> It should be asked whether users want to trade formatting freedom for those
> benefits. If it has been asked, I missed that discussion. So unless it's an
> heavy maintenance burden to allow floating properties, for example, I don't
> see why I, as a user, shouldn't be allowed to make that choice.
That’s a fair point.
> To those who repeat the performance argument: This is an opt-in only request.
> It is not about changing the performance of default Org, or making files more
> difficult to parse outside of Emacs for everyone.
I disagree with your last claim.
Rasmus
--
It was you, Jezebel, it was you
