To add some ideas that have been occurring to me these days...
I am more and more convinced that inline special blocks, by their
nature, should not support fine tune options or anything like
attr_latex, attr_html, etc. like its older brothers, as it would produce
an overly complicated syntax. Big brothers are independent of the
paragraph and there it makes sense to add lines with attr_latex, etc.,
since it is a line-oriented syntax. Bringing that into the paragraph is
unnecessarily overloading the paragraph and breaking the social contract
of lightweight markup, where paragraphs should still look like
paragraphs.
Another argument against possible fine-tuning within inline special
blocks, for export purposes, is that (in my opinion) direct formatting
is a practice that should be avoided as much as possible in a document.
A document with a lot of direct formatting is an inconsistent document.
In html, all possible formatting should be controlled by style sheets;
in LaTeX, by (re)defining macros, commands and environments in the
preamble or in a .sty file; in odt using character styles.
Perhaps if we detach special blocks from fine-tuning possibilities we
lose some (export) flexibility, but we gain in a clearer implementation
of these elements and keep Org aseptic about the output format. And in
any case, if someone needs a fine-tuning in a certain case, there are
always the export filters. Or it can be implemented in a similar way to
inline tasks, with a default format function (for html, latex, etc),
which can be changed via a defcustom.
Starting from that, a syntax like this in Org:
%[name]{contents}
Would produce in LaTeX, by default:
\name{contents}
in html:
<name>contents></name>
in odt:
<text:span text:style-name="name">contents</text:span>
and so on.
In short, I think it would be enough to simply implement something like
this.
Best regards,
Juan Manuel
