On 18 September 2012 21:53, José Lopes <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello Ivan, > > I agree with your point: if you want a heading that ends with a punctuation > sign then you cannot do it in Fmark (for now). That gives me something to > think about. However, I will still look for a way that avoids (as much as > possible) special syntax. Do you have any suggestion? > > I also agree with you on the "natural" conventions. I want to find a good > tradeoff between syntax and expressiveness. In other words, I want to > avoid as much those "odd choices" you mentioned. For example, I have > been thinking seriously about emphasis and what would be a good way > to do it. So far I could only come up with quotes (either " or '). What do > you think?
I think that _emphasis_ is pretty "natural", as is *bold* and possibly -strikethrough-. But you _are_ adding in some aspects of markup now. Using quotes is bad because what happens if you're actually quoting someone? ;-) > > Cheers, > José > > > On 18-09-2012 06:05, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote: >> >> On 18 September 2012 13:57, José Lopes <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> Hello Kris, >>> >>> Thank you for your email. >>> >>> At this moment, Fmark is not as powerful as Markdown, also because Fmark >>> just started. >>> Markdown offers things such as Blockquotes, Lists, Code blocks, links, >>> emphasis, images, etc. >>> Fmark does not offer as many features: for now, there are only >>> paragraphs, >>> headings, >>> subsections (endless nesting) and footnotes. In the near future, I want >>> to >>> bolds/italics, >>> ordered and unordered lists, links, and later on as many elements as >>> possible :) >>> >>> The problem with Fmark is also its greatest feature. While other markup >>> languages >>> introduce special syntactic characters to give meaning to the document's >>> elements, >>> I would like to take a different approach: I want to use characters that >>> people already >>> use in document writing to achieve the same result. For example, in >>> Mediawiki a >>> heading is some text surrounded by equal signs. But in Fmark a heading is >>> simply some >>> text that does not end in a punctuation character, such as period or an >>> exclamation mark. >>> I argue that this is a more "natural" approach. >> >> Is it possible to override this? What happens if I want a heading of >> "This is the greatest Heading Ever!!!!!" ? >> >> "Natural" conventions seem to be to be rather hacky and with lots of >> corner cases; I think it's better to define a specific syntax for >> markup (e.g. what is the "natural" way of emphasising text?) and stick >> to it (though I agree that Markdown has some odd choices; in >> particular, the ability to use both _ and * for italics whilst >> requiring ** for bold). >> >>> I want to find a natural way of not burdening the user with the task of >>> having to learn >>> some special syntax in order to write a document. Instead I want to find >>> "natural" ways >>> of writing and use those ways to reconstruct the elements in a document. >>> Of >>> course, >>> what is natural is subjective and that is why I want to find a good >>> tradeoff >>> between >>> expressiveness and simplicity in the syntax. For example, in Fmark a >>> footnote is some >>> text surrounded by square brackets. Maybe you find this natural, maybe >>> you >>> don't. If a >>> handful of people defend a more natural way of writing footnotes I want >>> to >>> implement >>> the way they say. If there is a more natural way of doing this I want to >>> find it. But for now >>> I think square brackets are better than the equal signs or any other >>> strange >>> syntactic >>> character such as exclamation marks and so on... >>> >>> Another thing about Fmark is styles. I want to use fmark personally to >>> write >>> papers, using >>> Latex as backend. While experimenting with previous versions of Fmark I >>> realized that I >>> could not specify the title, the author, the date, and the abstract. >>> which >>> are essential in a >>> paper. I came up with an idea which I think is quite interesting. I wrote >>> another document >>> also using Fmark which only had the words "Title", "Author", "Date", and >>> "Abstract". And >>> then I combined these two documents together, such that, Fmark associated >>> title, author, >>> date and abstract, with the corresponding content. I thought the idea was >>> interesting >>> because the content and style documents have both the same structure and >>> are >>> both >>> written in Fmark. Of course, there is still a long way to go, in order to >>> be >>> able to fully >>> customize a document. >>> >>> But styles are a good and simple approach, similar to document classes in >>> Latex: the idea is >>> to write one document (content) and then use multiple (predefined, user >>> defined) styles, such >>> as, article, report, etc, to stylize your document. Another interesting >>> thing I have been thinking >>> about (but not implemented yet) is recursion in document styling. In a >>> way, >>> weaving a style >>> with content can be compared to matching a regular expression. >>> >>> Anyway, these are just some key ideas. I see Fmark as a work in progress >>> and >>> in a way as a >>> research project, trying to find a natural way of writing documents while >>> escaping as much >>> as possible from the syntax of a programming language. I also have a >>> metagoal with this >>> project: if my father (the non programming guy) could use it to write his >>> PhD dissertation, >>> I would be quite happy :) >>> >>> If you have any more questions I would be happy to answer. >>> But if you're interested in using markup languages for blogs perhaps a >>> HTML >>> backend >>> in Fmark would be more interesting for you. Although, XML + JavaScript + >>> CSS >>> is also possible. >>> >>> Best regards, >>> José >>> >>> >>> On 18-09-2012 04:25, Kristopher Micinski wrote: >>>> >>>> Jose, >>>> >>>> So I'm interested to hear you opinion on this as well... >>>> >>>> I use Pandoc with Markdown through Hakyll, which allows you to do a >>>> fair amount of cute things that are just really helpful for >>>> maintaining a blog (for example..). But I didn't get this from >>>> reading your github readme: what makes your markup language special? >>>> Could you give an example of how the language is more expressive than >>>> (say) markdown processed through Pandoc (I only mention because it >>>> lets you process LaTeX, very helpful, right...) or something >>>> comparable? >>>> >>>> kris >>>> >>>> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 11:09 PM, José Lopes <[email protected]> >>>> wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Hello everyone, >>>>> >>>>> I just wanted to share a package I created called Fmark, now available >>>>> on HackageDB. >>>>> >>>>> Feedback both on the project and on the code is greatly appreciated :) >>>>> >>>>> Fmark (Friendly Markup) is a very simple markup language without >>>>> syntax and simple but sophisticated document styling, capable of >>>>> producing PDF and XML files. >>>>> >>>>> The key philosophy behind this markup language is to eliminate the >>>>> strange syntactic characters seen in most markup languages, but >>>>> at the same time try to maintain a high level of expressiveness, using >>>>> only document reconstruction. >>>>> >>>>> Check it out >>>>> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/fmark >>>>> https://github.com/jabolopes/fmark >>>>> >>>>> Best regards, >>>>> José >>>>> >>>>> -- >>>>> José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes >>>>> 58612 - MEIC-A >>>>> Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (UTL) >>>>> [email protected] >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> _______________________________________________ >>>>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >>>>> [email protected] >>>>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >>> >>> >>> -- >>> José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes >>> Instituto Superior Técnico >>> Technical University of Lisbon >>> >>> >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Haskell-Cafe mailing list >>> [email protected] >>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe >> >> >> > > -- > José António Branquinho de Oliveira Lopes > Instituto Superior Técnico > Technical University of Lisbon > -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic [email protected] http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
