Ciao Mat I think part of the issue is that there large variation about the scope of what "markup" means.
The term "markup" was originally derived from printer's (blue or red pen) annotations that were instructions for the layout of physical type on a printing press. This later evolved into formalised typesetting systems. LaTex and troff emerged, in turn from those (and as Jed mentions, PDF partly carries the heritage of that and is still used by publishers as a way to submit a documents to printers). Then there is HTML, SGML, XML etc. Long history, several directions. (See here for a reasonable overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markup_language#History_of_markup_languages) A major issue that emerged over the years is to what extent they are "presentational", "procedural", "descriptive" or "semantic". MarkDown and cousins is a "lightweight markup language" (LML) ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language Coming to your question with regards to WikiText in TW ... I think Jed is likely close with "macro language". It "does things" you would not normally think of as just a LML system. Its worth underling that its possible in TW to seamlessly add new markup parsers, or modify existing ones. In other words, its "markup potential" is not inherently any specific LML, rather its, in a way, a macro language that can define them. Best wishes Josiah On Saturday, 15 June 2019 12:33:10 UTC+2, Mat wrote: > > In the docs <https://tiddlywiki.com/prerelease/#WikiText> it says > > WikiText is a concise, expressive way of typing a wide range of text >> formatting, hypertext and interactive features. It allows you to focus on >> writing without a complex user interface getting in the way. It is designed >> to be familiar for users of MarkDown >> <http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/>, but with more of a focus >> on linking and the interactive features. > > > but if I were to describe it to coders, I'd say it is a "high level > language" but is it a pure "markup language"? And could it at all be called > any of these; declarative, imperative, scripting, procedural, functional > etc? > > BTW, that quote above... there is an irony here. Because of TW's > generality, I find a lot of my time is *not* spent on "focus on writing > without a complex user interface getting in the way". Instead a lot of > time is spent on customizing the content to have it shown 'my way' and that > does involve complex UI matters. > > <:-) > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" 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/tiddlywiki. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tiddlywiki/94d1b301-cd86-43a1-8003-e37daeb67eab%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
