On Mon, 10 Dec 2018 at 20:11, Jaime Tarrasa <[email protected]> wrote: > > > El domingo, 9 de diciembre de 2018, 0:32:57 (UTC+1), Lex Trotman escribió: >> >> >> Currently there isn't a specification, its on the todo list of a >> number of people, but nobody has had the time available to do it. > > > ??? > So when people in asciidoctor write code they do it on the fly. Someone says > "I'm going to implement this". Nobody writes it down, the coder programs it, > but has no time to write what the program was supposed to do. So to know what > asciidoctor does they skim the code.
Asciidoc the language was developed over a long time by one person, he didn't sit down one day and say "I'll design a markup and do a requirements spec, language spec, design spec" before he started coding. As I said Asciidoctor followed the original very closely, down to producing identical output from the test suite. As Asciidoc is so mature its not like there are changes to syntax or semantics every day. Changes tend to be more tweaks not revolutions. And thats the way things go in open source community contributed software development, things evolve, they are rarely designed against a spec. > >> Having multiple implementations is good for the ecosystem > > > If they are compatible. Agreed, at least for basic capabilities, targets etc. > There is no specification, so. Multiple implementations of what? > Do asciidoctor and asciidoc.org have a private chat to talk what the standard > is? > With no written standard, what you are going to get is divergent > implementations and probably a fight to rule standard. > Its always possible, but so far the community tries to be cooperative and persuade people to work together. >> >> (eg Asciidoc >> Python can't be used by github, but Asciidoctor being Ruby can be), >> but the intention is to try to avoid the markdown scenario where >> everybody has their own variant. > > > No success. You already have two incompatible variants. And only because > nobody else has decided to implement it. > Asciidoctor can process all documents that Asciidoc Python can, Asciidoc Python isn't being developed further because as I said Python 2 is EOLing soon. The Python 3 port is just that, a port, so its totally compatible (except for bugs). If contributors wish to develop it further to add newer Asciidoctor features thats fine. >> >> >> Hopefully the specification effort will begin in the new year. > > > Once again. The implementation must already be there, somewhere. I don't > believe they write code from the empty air. But apparently they keep it like > trade secret. > The user guides for both Asciidoc and Asciidoctor describe the language, put your conspiracy theories away, there is no hidden spec. >> >> >> > >> > Reading users guide, examples, blogs and FAQs I can gather scattered >> > information so I can "reverse engineering" for a parser, but with are lot >> > of doubts. >> > One of the supposed advantages of asciidoc over markdown is that there are >> > not a lot of incompatible flavors. But it looks that the standarization of >> > asciidoc comes from having only two "de facto" parsers: asciidoc.org and >> > asciidoctor.org, (and now asciidoc3.org?) >> >> Effectively the current standard is asciidoctor, its the one actively >> maintained and enhanced. > > > What you say is that asciidoc is not a standard format, but the > implementation of asciidoctor. > The (current) committee that rules asciidoc format is in asciidoctor. They > deliberate what enhancements, reforms and changes to make. And when they > reach an agreement, instead of publishing a specification, they publish the > new version of the toolchain and an article with an overview of changes. I > suppose that until someone dethrones asciidoctor as the owner of standard... > maybe looking things from this point of view the trade secret concept makes > sense. All Asciidoc implementations are open source contributed software, whoever contributes proposes changes and they are discussed openly on github. > > People who writes in asciidoc must trust in asciidoctor, not in a inexistent > public standard format named asciidoc. Is this the portable standard that was > going to end with markup languages wars? > > I'm really astonished. Welcome to cooperative open source development, nobody "owns" the code, no corporation controls it, its moves in the direction contributors want to. > > >> Well, if you don't have a huge investment in Asciidoc Python, then the >> advice is to use the Asciidoctor implementation, as I said its the one >> thats maintained and enhanced, so not needed at the moment. >> > > I am translating a book and I wanted to convert it to several formats, > basically FB2 and HTML. I wrote the book in asciidoc format and wrote a > translator in Pascal language to generate FB2. My parser is very simple > because my documents are very simple, I only used a few features. I could > have used any lightweight markup language (in fact, I could have created my > own markup), but I chose asciidoc because I read it was very standard and I > wanted to remove the dust of my programming skills programming a parser. Excellent, I hope you can make it available on Github, even if its a subset it is useful if it targets something no other implementation does. > > After programing a simple parser that only was aware of a few markup > features, I was going start implementation of the full-compliant asciidoc > parser. But there is no such thing, there is no specification to be > full-compliant of. I wanted to write a parser for a standard format not to > chase a hidden moving target, so I won't do more investment in Asciidoc, let > it be Asciidoc-python or Asciidoctor. Nobody is forced to do anything they don't want to, thats contributed software development, but of course if you don't contribute you don't get to have any say in what happens. > > Asciidoctor and asciidoc-python guys, you'd better move to the top of the > list writing a specification, stop anything you are doing, and publish the > specification, better today than tomorrow, moreover better yesterday than > today. As I said above, its open source contributed projects, when contributors have the time and desire or a company pays its employees to contribute to a specification it will happen. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "asciidoc" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "asciidoc" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/asciidoc. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
