EMJ (2015-04-16) This is all a bit misleading:
- the page title
- Writing "TeXt" like that seems to suggest some sort of relationship to TeX, which there isn't.
- restructured text
- Google this today and the entire first page of results are about something
which is not this subject at all! - RestructuredText
- This is something that Zope used to talk about, but apparently don't any more (the link lower down this page is dead and a search on the Zope site has never heard of it).
- reStructuredText
- This (one word!) is part of Docutils and has the Zope thing as an ancestor.
CMcC explained in the Tcl chatroom: "There are a lot of variants on STX, and there'll be a lot more, but they all share a couple of characteristics (e.g., significant blank lines, leading space for indenting, * for unordered list, etc.). Some people from Python are trying to come up with a canonical STX. I'm tracking their work, and adapting it."
RS earlier made up the name "WikiML", which he thought might be a bit more intuitive... See Wiki format to HTML for a simple converter.CMcC was thinking that .wml is already a well known file extension, where StructuredTeXt makes a reasonable .stx file extension, also the Python crowd seems to have a fair bit of work on the concept, and they've used StructuredText fairly widely. Certainly googling structured text will get you further than wiki markup language, and I think these markup languages are of more general strategic value than its use only on wikis.
It should be possible to upcast pure HTML to a sufficiently powerful StructuredText. This would represent a great increase in signal-to-noise ratio, and amplify structure while attenuating pointless presentation. -- CMcC
Examples/Implementations
- The language used in editing TIPs is also a variant of STX.
- The Wikit language used to edit pages here (see Formatting Rules)
- I've written a pretty slick implementation of a wiki-like Structured Text translator, here [1][Bad URL 2011-07-05] - CMcC 22Apr2005
- Presumably the first Wiki Markup Language: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiMarkupLanguage
References/Links
- http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/introduction.html has some good thinking about the subject, courtesy of Python. I don't necessarily agree with their outcomes, but they're working toward a formal definition of the language, which IMHO is a good thing. - CMcC
- http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/STX here's another good intro to the general concept.
- http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml talks about the value of a simpler markup language (than HTML, and presumably XML and SGML) for authoring documents.
