On Sun, 2005-06-12 at 04:57 +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
a) This {{i may be {{b}}nested, as long}} reads horrible. Having styles separated from words with spaces makes them look like words. They are markup syntax, hence must be clearly visually distinct from the content they describe.
I agree it looks bad, so let's consider some alternatives (I've separated this into a separate thread).
We need some way to tag a short span of text with either a unique ID or a non-unique class. The current proposal uses the alpha/numeric separation to do this. We could use just numbers, and tag them with a special character:
{{.5 may be {{#7 nested}}, as long}}
(The "." and "#" are used by CSS) But that makes it difficult to have built-in styles with understandable names.
Another possibility is to put the ID between the braces:
{i{ may be {b{ nested}}, as long}}
This separates them from the words a little, but might make parsing a bit trickier. I definitely don't want to change the methods of marking big blocks--that is, using begin/end consistent with other parts of the syntax, and having a lone {{style}} on a line mark the following block. I hate having long-range bracketing--programmers are used to it, but new users are much more comfortable with "tag this next thing", or having the big brackets /very/ clearly marked.
FWIW, I imagine that these will not be used often enough to be a big problem, because most of what needs to be done can be done with the symbolic shortcuts. But the full capability needs to get there somehow for those special cases.
Any other ideas?