reStructuredText
I'm writing some things in reStructuredText, which is a wiki-like markup language that can be translated into HTML, LaTeX and so on. It's pretty cool: you write text much as you might write a plain-text email or comment, with asterisks for bold, indenting for quoted sections and so on.
There was a phase a few years ago were the world was made for SGML and XML, but really those are not formats that humans ought to need to see. I suppose HTML is harmless enough, and the parsers are pretty slack. But DocBook is pretty horrendous to write by hand, even with a smart editor. I suppose if you're doing a very Serious Technical Book the overhead might be worthwhile, but most of the time most of us are not.
reST is actually a lot like the SDF format my friend Ian Clatworthy wrote years ago. There is probably some kind of lesson there about open source adoption patterns.
posted Mon 8 Dec 2003 in /software/formats | link
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