Re: Concrete suggestions to improve Org mode third-party integration :: an afterthought following Karl Voit's Orgdown proposal

[Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide]

Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:



> Russell Adams <RLAdams@AdamsInfoServ.Com> writes:
>> That Org can also be used to export to other formats is both a
>> blessing and a curse. Org can only do high level constructs in the
>> languages it exports to, and really should only be expected to do just
>> that. It's a paper thin macro or template over a much more complicated
>> document language.
…
>> The exporting is the difference in expectations. Org's lightweight
>> markup is quite simple, and the documents it produces should be as
>> well. This is much like the original HTML specification. Look how
>> complicated it is to write HTML now with CSS and Javascript emulating
>> mundane functions after decades of bolt on "standards".


Yes, the language-specific hacks are outside its scope. When I do
#+latex: …
or
@@html:…@@

I am in the export formats.

What should not happen is that 

>>> Please do not make org-mode volatile.¹
>> …
>> I think our maintainers have done an excellent job of minimizing the
>> impact of any changes.

Yes, they have. That’s why I wrote that it is a too rarely highlighted
strength, that Emacs is stable.

>> However I only export Org to be backwardly compatible with itself, not
>> the languages it makes exports to.

One of the big strengths of org-mode is in its integrations. When the
languages change that it exports to, it cannot do much. But where they
don’t, an update of org-mode should not break the export.

From the expectations-side, that’s the extended 80/20 rule: 80% of your
users only use 20% of the features¹, but they don’t all use the same
20%. So everytime you break something that’s not in the core 20%, you
lose some users until only a small core is left that actually did not
use anything outside those 20%.

¹: for org-mode it migh rather be 5% :-)

> As you point out, the big benefit of org mode is that the files are
> plain text. This means you will always be able to 'fix' any issues which
> arise from change. It might not be convenient and you may be frustrated
> by such change, but you will likely have a much better outcome than you
> would with any other document formatting system which is not based on
> plain text. 

Yes — that’s also one of the reasons why I’m using org-mode.

It’s awesome integrations and tooling are why I use org-mode instead of
markdown or asciidoc or similar. It binds all my work in Emacs together.

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

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