Re: Text processor

[Havoc Pennington <rhp zirx pair com>]

On 19 Jun 1999, Alan Shutko wrote:
> You don't need to save all of that in the file.  Most of that, I would
> consider session management things, but if you wanted to send someone
> a document which had the cursor position and window size saved, you
> could encode them as comments within the DocBook (or whatever) file.
> 

Right, and a DocBook file with magic comments is a proprietary format.
Maybe one that other tools can get partial information from - but
nonetheless proprietary. Plus, it's a hack, unextensible (no user-defined
"tags"), and annoying to parse.

IMHO it's simpler to have a custom format, and then be able to export to
(or import from) docbook if you want to interchange files.

Don't get me wrong, an Emacs mode for editing DocBook might be nice -
though PSGML is pretty good - but I don't think it's really what I'd want
for writing. Even though I spend 10 hours a day in front of Emacs.

I'm just telling you what sort of program I would write though - I think
it's all for the better if you write a program that you want to write.

Havoc