Tom Gillespie writes: > Karl, > The exact naming of a thing is nearly always the most contentious > step in trying to promulgate it. In my own field we can easily get all > parties to agree on a definition, but they refuse to budge on a name. > As others have said, I wouldn't worry about kibitizing over the name. > > I would however worry about the larger negative reaction. From my > perspective I think the issue is that there are many efforts working > toward a formalized specification for Org syntax and Org mode > functionality, and some of those stakeholders who have invested > significant effort may feel blindsided by a public declaration > announcing Orgdown because they were not consulted and not > made aware that you were working on it. > > I appreciate the amount of work that you have put in, I have devoted > hundreds of hours to working on an alternate implementation of org > in Racket that uses a formal ebfn in hopes that others will be able > to use it as a guide and as a way to talk formally about how Org > parsers and implementations should behave. > > It would thus be easy for me to say that your approach has put the > cart before the horse, because there are countless nuances in the > specification for Org syntax which must be addressed before any > levels of org compliance can be specified, otherwise the behavior > between levels will be inconsistent. > > If I were to say this, it would not be fair to you at all. The ideas > and motivation for Orgdown are vital and important. You have put > in enormous thought and effort, all because you care about Org > and want to see it succeed. > > The issue is that any shared specification for Org syntax is > fundamentally about how to coordinate as a community. > The way that Orgdown was presented to the community feels > (to me) like it is being imposed top down or coming from an > individual source, not from an open and visible community > process (the subject of your original email reads as a declaration > in english, and thus can be quite off putting, though I know that > was not the intention). > > I personally haven't bothered with promulgation because I think > that we are not technically ready as a community to approach > outreach to other developers in a way that we can succeed. > > The good news is that all of this can co-exist if we want it to, > but we need to be clear about our objectives as a community. > > To me these objectives are as follows (and I would love > to hear from others about additional or alternate objectives). > > 1. To never fracture Org syntax so as to avoid the nightmare > of markdown flavors. (This means being able to say clearly > as a community that a parser is out of compliance and that > it is up to the user to fix their files. The ruby org parser used > by Github is a major issue here.) > 2. To provide a clear specification for what graceful degradation > looks like when parsing Org syntax if a parser does not support > some portion of that syntax (e.g. should property drawer lines > be excluded or rendered as plain text?). > 3. Provide a solid basis on which further formal specification > can be built. (My interests in particular are around providing > consistent semantics for org-babel blocks across languages > so that babel implementations can clearly communicate what > runtime features they support.) > > The approach for Orgdown can absolutely meet all three of > these objectives, however in its current form Orgdown1 is not > sufficiently well specified to avoid fracturing the syntax. > This is because Org syntax is extremely complex (even the > elisp implementation of Org mode is internally inconsistent) > and there are edge cases where behavior will diverge if parsing > of even the simplest elements is not fully specified. > > There are many ways to remedy this, however they require > a more formal approach. A number of us are working to build > technical foundations for such a formal approach, but I do not > think that any of those projects are ready to be used to > specify discrete levels of Org syntax parsing compliance. > > If I may, I would suggest that an Orgdown0 is something that > could be well specified, but it would avoid parsing of markup > altogether and only deal with the major element types. Parsing > paragraphs and all the org objects is not something that can > be done piecemeal. There are too many interactions between > different parts of the syntax, and in some cases the existing > specification desperately needs to be revisited due to the > complexity that it induces or because it is underspecified. > Of course this would make Orgdown0 fairly useless as a > replacement for markdown, but at least it would be a start.
Everything you comment here seems very sensible to me. Anyway I have to say that, in my case, the name 'orgdown' is not the issue, but the underlying idea under the naming, whatever the name is. IMHO, reduce Org to a markup language or, to put it somewhat metaphorically, distill Org into a workable markup language outside Org itself and GNU Emacs, is a task that seems impossible to me. Or at least (for not being so radical), quite difficult. And, on the other hand, what would be the point of doing that? I think Org and Markdown are the antipodes, they are like water and oil, although they share certain purposes. Just to make my current opinion clear. Best regards, Juan Manuel
