So many re-inventing SCRIBE from the '80s. Kind of funny actually.
In the 70's and 80's we used ASCII terminals to edit documentation, and only some terminals supported attributes like bold, italic, and underline. But you needed to be able to read it in its "raw" form.
So there were many systems developed that let you put the "markup" inside the document and keep it as reasonable as possible. The one I wrote a number of term papers in was SCRIBE that ran on the TENEX later TOPS20 machine and put the "final" output to a Diablo Hytype printer.
Consider that you had a team of 20 software developers working to build a software package for writing text documents that could both be read when being created/edited and later processed into beautifully typeset documents using a film typesetter.
This in contrast to a developer saying "hmm I'm putting up all this stuff in HTML and typing too much, I'll add a few shortcuts here, here, and here. Ta da! It works for me."
The availability of cheap dot matrix displays and "desktop publishing" set aside all those goals of editing with a text editor and instead using "WYSIWYG" environments of increasing complexity and bloat.
I applaud the reStructuredText people for wanting to attack the problem but I really wish they could look at what has already been done in this space to avoid the mistakes of the past. A version of SCRIBE that was UTF-8 clean would be pretty awesome as a starting point.
In my own workflow I find working in text faster because if I use a WYSIWYG editor I get so distracted by it looking "wrong" that I can't focus on the text itself. I would truly love something that was TMWYW (tell me what you want) rather than something that keeps trying to show me what it thinks I want.
In the 70's and 80's we used ASCII terminals to edit documentation, and only some terminals supported attributes like bold, italic, and underline. But you needed to be able to read it in its "raw" form.
So there were many systems developed that let you put the "markup" inside the document and keep it as reasonable as possible. The one I wrote a number of term papers in was SCRIBE that ran on the TENEX later TOPS20 machine and put the "final" output to a Diablo Hytype printer.
Consider that you had a team of 20 software developers working to build a software package for writing text documents that could both be read when being created/edited and later processed into beautifully typeset documents using a film typesetter.
This in contrast to a developer saying "hmm I'm putting up all this stuff in HTML and typing too much, I'll add a few shortcuts here, here, and here. Ta da! It works for me."
The availability of cheap dot matrix displays and "desktop publishing" set aside all those goals of editing with a text editor and instead using "WYSIWYG" environments of increasing complexity and bloat.
I applaud the reStructuredText people for wanting to attack the problem but I really wish they could look at what has already been done in this space to avoid the mistakes of the past. A version of SCRIBE that was UTF-8 clean would be pretty awesome as a starting point.
In my own workflow I find working in text faster because if I use a WYSIWYG editor I get so distracted by it looking "wrong" that I can't focus on the text itself. I would truly love something that was TMWYW (tell me what you want) rather than something that keeps trying to show me what it thinks I want.