Re: [O] Allowing loose ordering in Org files

[Karl Voit]

* John Wiegley <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> In my regimen, every single entry has a PROPERTIES drawer, since I tag each
> one with ID and CREATED, for future reference. 

This also holds for my Org-mode files - in general.

> Most items are SCHEDULED as well. So when I open up a headline to
> look at the contents, I see:
>
>     * Head
>     SCHEDULED
>     text
>    :PROPERTIES:...
>
> It's a trivial thing, but I'd rather not scan past two lines to start reading
> my entry.

I just wanted to add an additional notion to the discussion:

In most cases, the content of the drawers gets populated
automatically (LOGBOOK, CREATED, ...). In some cases, I manually add
properties, mainly :ID: for being able to use references to it.

Below the drawers, there is the actual content which is free text,
mixed with lists, blocks, and so forth.

In those cases, I prefer drawers being closed by default.


However, in my contacts.org file, I have entries where the actual
content is in a rather strict form like:

,----
| ** Firstname Lastname                  :FirstnameLastname:
| :PROPERTIES:
| :TYPE: person
| :TITLE:
| :EMAIL: address@hidden
| :URL: http://example.com
| :MOBILE: 0043/123456789
| :HOMEPHONE:
| :WORKPHONE:
| :PHONE:
| :COMPANY:
| :STREET: Herrengasse 42
| :POSTALCODE: 8042
| :CITY: Graz
| :COUNTRY: Österreich
| :PHOTOGRAPH: [[photo:FirstnameLastname.jpg]]
| :BORN: 1970-12-31
| :ITOLDTHEM_EMAIL: address@hidden
| :ITOLDTHEM_ADDRESS: home
| :ITOLDTHEM_PHONE: mobile
| :ADDRESS_CHANGE_METHOD: email
| :CREATED:  [2015-11-11 Wed 16:51]
| :END:
|
| - first contact: <2015-11-11 Wed> when meeting at id:FooConf15
`----

Here, the drawer is of particular interest to me and I'd love to
have them expanded together with the heading.

Besides, I once started an attempt to define a standard for contact
property item names in order to enable external tools to parse
contact data like [1]. Unfortunately, my focus shifted and I did not
follow my standardization attempt much further:
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/45347/focus=45740
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/47434/focus=47490
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/57231/
[...]


Two notions: first, content of properties are of different interest
for different people in different org-mode files with different
data. It's hard to derive a general rule here.

Second, I still do think that a bit more standardization would be a
benefit for Org-mode (contact data, order of org elements, ...).
Having written a pretty dumb Org-mode parser in Python by myself for
[2] I recognized that this is not an easy job to do properly outside
of Elisp. And: being able to use Org-mode files outside of
Emacs/Elisp is also of interest for all users of Emacs/Elisp.

Just my 2 cents.


[1] https://github.com/novoid/org-contacts2vcard

[2] https://github.com/novoid/lazyblorg

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