As many of you know, I'm in the middle of creating an authoring format
called Stylz. You author Stylz docs in any old editor. Think of an
Asciidoc knockoff which greatly prioritizes styles based authoring at
the expense of Asciidoc's "we do it all for you."
One of my tasks in order to reach Minimum Viable Product (MVP) status
is to give the author a way of storing the book's metadata. By metadata
I mean stuff like author, title, copyright, etc, combined with build
info like CSS files to be inserted to link styles with their
appearances in HTML and ePub outputs, or LaTeX layout files (similar to
those in LyX) to link styles with their appearances in PDF and paper.
The metadata is not, not, NOT going to be in the .stylz file itself:
The .stylz file names styles and assumes somebody else will define them.
So I need a format in which the author can put the metadata/buildinfo.
Because I'm not a fan of dependencies, I right away ruled out mysql,
Postgres, SQLite or MongoDB. From my perspective, this leaves Yaml,
JSON, directory trees with leaf filenames being keys and their contents
being values. Can anyone think of other alternatives?
Do you think an author would prefer JSON or Yaml? I used key/value
directory trees on UMENU2, and as a practical matter they turn out to
be very tedious to author. Any other ideas besides JSON and Yaml?
Thanks,
SteveT
Steve Litt
April 2018 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques
