Orgdown: negative feedback & attempt of a root-cause analysis (was: "Orgdown", the new name for the syntax of Org-mode)

[Karl Voit]

Hi,

* M  ‘quintus’ Gülker <mg@guelker.eu> wrote:
>
> 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.

One of the next things I do have on my list is to try out crdt as
I've learned at EmacsConf21 that it is mature enough to be used in
practice. 

If that holds true, we can start dreaming of having a Etherpad-like
session from our GNU/Emacs while peers are connected to the same
session via some web-based tool/service.

> 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.

The dominant feedback of
https://www.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/r4cq3o/orgdown_the_new_name_for_the_syntax_of_orgmode/
was negative comments on the name and nothing else. Even here,
although due to a much more civilized style, the name choice was the
dominant topic and not the idea. I have to take this as a strong
signal here and I'm very close in giving up on Orgdown as a project.

I did underestimate the power of the name choice as I clearly was
impatient because I was looking forward to interesting discussions
on the idea itself like in this sub-thread.

There were two possible generic approaches for me: start from zero
with an open process, involving peers in all choices such as naming,
Orgdown1 syntax elements, ...

While this approach offers maximum community involvement, my fear
was to get into too many long discussions about details before I
could express my vision to anybody in a concise way.

Second approach: define everything myself up to Orgdown7 (as an
example) and publish with a big bang. The downsides here are
obvious.

I chose an in-between approach: defining only a minimal set (name,
common structure/idea/documentation, Orgdown1, providing a
collaborative home on GitLab) and hope for a project community that
will take over (or at least support) from there, discussing syntax
elements for Orgdown2 and taking the project to its next logical
steps.

In hindsight, this decision was wrong.

Quite frankly, I don't have the energy to throw away everything and
start from zero with a different name.

People do not seem to realize what it took to get there - which is
partly understandingly because I had to learn by doing what it takes
to get the idea into a coherent and consistent form. 

Simply switching to a different name is not just search&replace. It
would reset the project almost to its very start again, losing the
go-live effect of previous weekend (whose effect might be
questionable considering the name discussion), its project URL that
is now out there, the motivation video which aims to explain the
motivation to users of Emacs, the EmacsConf21 talk publicity, and it
would require much effort to reach the status where Orgdown is now.

>> 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.

I agree and I have thought about it myself already.

My guess is that most people do not suffer much from different
Markdown flavors because they rarely mix them in their workflows. I
guess most people are using Markdown only in their text editor OR
only in GitHub/GitLab org files OR only within any other
Markdown-tool.

I might be in an unusual situation where I do have to work with
GitHub/GitLab flavored Markdown README files AND with DIY company
solutions that work with pp (the preprocessor) to generate documents
from a specific Markdown flavor AND with reddit Markdown flavour AND
so forth. 

If this holds true, than this might be a weak argument for an
alternative markup instead of Markdown after all.

Bastien told me that he would be interested to see hard numbers on
my assumption that Org-mode syntax is easier to learn and type in
comparison to other LWM. And he is right: some research work in
order to get numbers would be awesome to shed some light on the
forest of assumptions. Maybe somebody in a position to realize such
a case study gets motivated now? ;-)

Does "assuming too much on other people's world because on my own
small world" have a scientific name? I might be in danger of having
this disease? *g*

> 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. 

This sounds also a plausible explanation and is also boosted by
another posting as an answer to yours.

> 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.

Hm. I have to think about this.

If this path is followed, then it might be hard to find target
groups willing to switch away from WYSIWYG tools which is the only
alternative I can think of here. 

I don't think that users of LaTeX/ConTeXt are part of the target
group. They would actually lose a bit of having control, I think.
And Overleaf might be too hard to beat I guess although I personally
don't like to use cloud-based services but meanwhile that's the
opinion of a tiny minority.

However, nice input and thankfully not just about the "horrible
name" for a change. Thank you for that. ;-)

Karl