Re: "Orgdown", the new name for the syntax of Org-mode

[M . ‘quintus’ Gülker]

Am Montag, dem 29. November 2021 schrieb Karl Voit:
> It seems to be the case that the name "Orgdown" is the reason why
> the Org-mode community does not support the idea of an
> implementation-agnostic definition of the syntax. Which is ... kinda
> funny if you think about it.
>
> Well if the project is not working out, at least I made my point and
> we continue to have all those misunderstandings and lack of Orgdown
> support in 3rd party tools (because Org-mode is way too big).

I think the project has value; better tooling outside of Emacs is
something org can only profit from in my opinion. One point that has not
been raised yet are scenarios of collaborative work; I would enjoy it
quite a bit if I could work on documents together with people who do not
like Emacs as an editor for whatever reason. Currently, org as a file
format is pretty much excluded if collaboration is intended with someone
who does not use Emacs. The natural choice in these cases is Markdown.

I agree that the name is kind of odd as it seems as if it is necessary
to invoke some association to Markdown. Other markup languages also do
not need that -- Textile, Asciidoc, etc. Perhaps it is best to simply
ignore the naming issue and focus on the actual work instead. It is far
more important to get the compatibility levels defined. After that you
can still reconsider the naming.

> Oh, there is a very large danger here of getting something that is
> not compatible with Org-mode any more. I don't think that this would
> be a good thing. At least the different flavors killed the fun of
> Markdown for me.

The astonishing thing is that most people manage to get along despite of
the incompatibilities of the different Markdown flavours. Otherwise
Markdown would not be such a success. Why is this? What can be learned
from this for creating org tools outside of Emacs? Actually surveying
this might be of interest.

Maybe most documents are very simple files. README files for FLOSS
projects, forum posts, blog posts. For such content the features where
the Markdown implementations differ are usually not required. It
suffices to use unstyled text, headings, code blocks, quotes, emphasis.
That is it basically. org shines on documents where more is required --
documentation, books, since recently scientific articles. Markdown’s
common subset is not expressive enough for these documents, whereas for
simple documents there is not much benefit in trading in Markdown for
org. Thus, maybe it is more fruitful to try to market org(down) as a
markup for complex documents, with the added benefit that it does
incidentally also cover simple documents nicely on par with Markdown.

  -quintus

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