Re: On being web-friendly and why info must die

[Achim Gratz]

Richard Stallman writes:
> Documentation of how to write such things in Org format
> is part of what is needed for Org format to be a candidate
> for a GNU documentation format.

Yes, but turning the tables: what exactly are the requirements for a GNU
documentation format?  If it turns out to be "exactly like texinfo",
then any other contender would have to be leaps and bounds better in at
least one or two other respects to be even considered seriously.

>   > For Org, it seems that macros would be the way to go unless we'd come up
>   > with yet another mechanism for semantic markup.
>
> What would this look like?

The macro invocations are those things in triple curly braces in the
manual section I posted.

This would be a macro defintion for a macro taking no argument

#+MACRO: page @@info:@page@@

while these two take arguments and the latter is using a macro within
its own definition

#+MACRO: markup @@info:@$1{@@$2@@info:}@@
#+MACRO: kbd {{{markup(kbd,$1)}}}

These macros define output specific to the info export backend by using
a so-called export snippet.  You could write these directly, but doing
this via macro expansion reduces the tedium somewhat.

> A solution that occurs to me is to use character pair brackets, such
> as _*foo*_ and _#foo#_ and *#foo#*.  These would provide enough
> alternatives to make the necessary distinctions.

Defining new syntax for Org that doesn't collide with already existing
things is not easy.  In this particular case, I don't even see an
advantage since the pair brackets aren't in any way self-describing, so
one would have to look them up each time they need to be used.


Regards,
Achim.
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