Hello Steve, I would think YAML is the best choice here. It is easy to type and easy for the beginner to understand. You could provide simple templates for the most common cases. My own feeling is that anything more complicated is going to turn off would-be authors.
Good luck with this project! Regards, Alan On 2 April 2018 at 10:02, Steve Litt <sl...@troubleshooters.com> wrote: > As many of you know, I'm in the middle of creating an authoring format > called Stylz. You author Stylz docs in any old editor. Think of an > Asciidoc knockoff which greatly prioritizes styles based authoring at > the expense of Asciidoc's "we do it all for you." > > One of my tasks in order to reach Minimum Viable Product (MVP) status > is to give the author a way of storing the book's metadata. By metadata > I mean stuff like author, title, copyright, etc, combined with build > info like CSS files to be inserted to link styles with their > appearances in HTML and ePub outputs, or LaTeX layout files (similar to > those in LyX) to link styles with their appearances in PDF and paper. > The metadata is not, not, NOT going to be in the .stylz file itself: > The .stylz file names styles and assumes somebody else will define them. > > So I need a format in which the author can put the metadata/buildinfo. > Because I'm not a fan of dependencies, I right away ruled out mysql, > Postgres, SQLite or MongoDB. From my perspective, this leaves Yaml, > JSON, directory trees with leaf filenames being keys and their contents > being values. Can anyone think of other alternatives? > > Do you think an author would prefer JSON or Yaml? I used key/value > directory trees on UMENU2, and as a practical matter they turn out to > be very tedious to author. Any other ideas besides JSON and Yaml? > > Thanks, > > SteveT > > Steve Litt > April 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques > of the Successful Technologist > http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques > -- Alan L Tyree http://www2.austlii.edu.au/~alan
