Josh sed:
Also surprised Owen hasn't brought Markdown into the mix here. Seems like the
perfect ASCII/monospace style for meaningful formatting.
The nice thing about "standards" is we have so many to choose from! -
Andy Tanenbaum ( http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Andrew_S._Tanenbaum )
Markdown:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/index.text
It strikes me as somewhat less awkward than HTML for *reading* and just
about like Wiki markup and not that different from the more-specialized
formats that support Javadoc or Doxygen. I'd love to see a taxonomic
chart of the myriad formal language specs out there. If not the "tower
of Babel" then perhaps the Cambrian Explosion?
Here we go on the rant!
There is a reason that the CS/CE community has the idiom "Yet Another".
Nothing (anyone else has done) is ever good enough for us, so we analyze
what has been done down to the gnats ass, pick a couple of
distinguishing characteristics and then conjure a *whole new system*
that meets this slightly different set of requirements.
"Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his christmas pie. He
stuck in his thumb, pulled out a plum, and said 'Oh what a good boy am I!'"
Referencing the Cambrian Explosion, this might very well be what is
going on both with text formatting and Google. Evolution seems to
depend more on draconian *pruning* than on speciation, though I guess
they go hand in hand. Google's aggressive pruning of it's own services
(up to and including the Nexus 4 and it's more demanding bleeding-edge
"fans", now fondly known as "Dougs"?) is just part of the froth of "life
itself" climbing the entropy gradient, expelling sub-optimal designs as
"reaction mass" to maintain steady acceleration up that slippery slope.
I guess I consider minimally formatted (caps, punctuation, spaces,
LF/CR) a pidgen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin ) lingua franca (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca )... and the additional
markup like my own favorite *bold* and _italics_ or "scare quotes" and
SHOUTING just a little extra color and spice in the lingo, dontcha kno
mon! My understanding/belief of culture and language is that the
interfaces between peoples of different cultures where such pidgen
languages thrive represent a great deal of richness and complexity
*because* they are so simple and context-dependent. It seems as if most
of us here are yearning for our favorite _pidgen_ to become a proper
_Creole_ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole ).
Of course I could be wrong, that's just my opinion!
- Steve
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