[eeps] New EEP draft: -discontiguous declaration

Wed Jun 8 04:01:04 CEST 2011

On 7/06/2011, at 10:00 PM, Raimo Niskanen wrote:
> 
> A Markdown document looks as plain text when you view it; plain text email.
> That is another possible view of "plain text".

I cannot understand you here.

Markdown does NOT look like plain text.
It is full of special characters which do not bear their usual meanings.
It is at ALL times, however viewed, a complex markup language.

If by "plain text" you mean only that it is something that can be
usefully viewed using TextEdit or Emacs or even vi, where "usefully"
means "you can figure out what some of the text is, even if there is
weirdness you do not fully understand", and mean to contrast this
with the strange semi-binary formats used by some word processors,
then yes, agreed, but in that sense, so are LaTeX and XHTML "plain
text".

We are agreed that Markdown (like LaTeX, XHTML, and to a large
degree RTF) is a "text" format rather than a binary format.
But to me, something counts as PLAIN text only if every character
that you see represents itself only.

>> 
>>> Or, check out the EEP repository; or from Github you can
>>> download it as a .tar.gz file.
>>> Edit eeps/eep-9999.md, ./build.pl, Browse eeps/eep-9999.html
>> 
>> Well, ever cooperative, I did just that.
>> Downloaded the .tar.gz (a little tricky because there is no
>> 'git' on this machine: rcs cvs svn hg even darcs but no git).
>> Unpacked it, and are my eyes deceiving me?
>> 
>> There is no eeps/eep-9999.md
> 
> ./build.pl builds any file named eeps/eep-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9].md,
> so if you copy the template eeps/eep-0033.md to e.g eeps/eep-9999.md
> and edit it it will be built into eeps/eep-9999.html. You can of course
> choose any number that is not occupied, but I thought 9999 was a nice
> temporary number to use.

Well, if someone says to me "edit frobnitz.zappo", I expect there to be
a "frobnitz.zappo" file already there that I can edit.

> 
>> 
>> Markdown is supposed to produce XHTML, we are told.
>> However,
>> 
>> 	perl md/Markdown.pl eeps/eep-0033.md > 33.htm
>> 
>> does not produce well-formed XML (the rock bottom entry level
>> requirement for something to count as XHTML), let alone valid
>> XHTML.
>> 
>> m% tidy 33.htm >/dev/null
>> line 1 column 1 - Warning: missing <!DOCTYPE> declaration
>> line 1 column 1 - Warning: inserting implicit <body>
>> line 1 column 1 - Warning: inserting missing 'title' element
>> Info: Document content looks like HTML 3.2
> 
> That it produces body content that can become valid XHTML when
> included in an XHTML file did not surprise me that much when
> thinking about how it normally is used, that is as a part
> of a containing page.

Producing an XHTML FRAGMENT is not the same thing as producing
XHTML.  It may not have surprised someone who is familiar with
the tool chain, but it most certainly surprised ME.

There is no reason why the process that includes the output in
"a containing page" cannot strip off the outer elements it has
no use for.

>> 
>> The headings are used wrongly in eep-0033.md,
> Is text before first <h1> allowed? I.e the <pre><code>...
> </code></pre><hr /> section?
> 

From ISO/IEC 15445:2000(E) :

<!ELEMENT HTML        - -  (HEAD, BODY) >

	The <HTML> ... </HTML> tags are required.

<!ELEMENT HEAD        - O  (TITLE) +(LINK | META | STYLE) >

	The <HEAD> tag is required and so is a <TITLE>.

<!ELEMENT BODY        - O  ((%block;)*,(H1,DIV1)* ) +(DEL|INS) >

	The <BODY> tag is required.  There may be material
	before the first <H1>, but it may not contain any <Hx>
	tags.

<!ELEMENT H1          - -  (%text;)+ >

	The <H1> and </H1> tags are required.

<!ELEMENT DIV1        O O  ((%block;)*, (H2,DIV2)* ) >

	The <DIV1> and </DIV1> tags are not required, and indeed,
	should not appear.  They have no attributes.

	ISO HTML element and attribute names are not case sensitive.