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

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Karl Voit <devnull@Karl-Voit.at> writes:
> * 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.

This does not represent my answer correctly.

I explicitly said that org is implementation-defined, so *full*
compatibility cannot easily be achieved outside Emacs. That does not
prevent partial compatibility.

>>> 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.

That would be pretty nice. You might also want to look at orgzly[1],
org-js[2], or markup-rocks[3].

[1]: http://www.orgzly.com/help
[2]: https://github.com/mooz/org-js
[3]: https://markup.rocks/

All of these call org-mode syntax simply "org".

> 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, ...

You can also just take up the already given arguments, form a decision,
and then move forward.

> 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.

Why is that?

From the technical side a simple entry in NEWS „Orgdown now uses the
name Org Syntax as alias“ and a second domain should suffice.

It’s the emotional side that no one but you could solve.

> 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.

Or they just don’t use 90% of markdown features. Titles, quoted, bold,
emphasis, links, inline-source, source-blocks. Which is a big difference
compared to Org mode.

Even with that, source-blocks tend to break between implementations.

>> 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.

And markdown has inline HTML: Anything missing (like tables) is just
exported from org-mode as HTML.

> 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.

Switching from LaTeX to Org-Mode was a very empowering step for me,
because it simpified most documents a lot, enabled quick restructuring,
allowed for easy tracking of TODO-states and using executed inline-code
via babel — and I gained HTML export for free.

It’s not the tool for a single paper to one journal that only has to fit
one format and is never edited after final submission, but for any
larger writing, org-mode is quite a boost in productivity.

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein,
ohne es zu merken.
draketo.de

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