Re: [Groff] Typesetting Markup Language (TML) - a Superset of Groff

[James K. Lowden]

On Sat, 16 Jan 2016 17:32:38 +0100
Steffen Nurpmeso <address@hidden> wrote:

> I think plain SGML is still an interesting language, much
> better than what XML made of it.  

As Dijkstra said of Algol, "an improvement over many of its
successors."  

> I had a time when i liked rst, but pimping POD is possibly nicer
> given how rst looks if you start real work with progamming stuff
> etc.  And then a nicely reduced ROFF (TeX, too) set of macros does
> look very clean!

I observe that my groff documents have the lowest markup/text ratio.
Less typing, more typesetting.  I suppose that's because, contrary to
XML, troff syntax was always meant to be typed by the user.  

My other observation is that all the new plaintext syntaxes run out of
gas before you get very far.  Try representing a table in markdown;
look for a way to do footnotes.  

--jkl