Re: [Out-of-Thread] Re: [RFC] Org syntax (draft)

[wgreenhouse-sGOZH3hwPm2sTnJN9+BGXg@public.gmane.org (W. Greenhouse)]

zeltak <zeltak-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> writes:

> Dear Carsten,
>
> Thank you for your quick reply. Let me start by first thanking you
> for your great work on orgmode, I only recently discovered it
> (someone referred me to your great talk on youtube) and it made me
> have the courage to start learning emacs and use orgmode.

[snip]

>  '(org-emphasis-alist (quote (("@" (:foreground "#B40000" :background
> "#FFDDDD" :weight bold) "" "") ("$" (:foreground "#FF0000") "" "")
> ("*" bold "<b>" "</b>") ("/" italic "<i>" "</i>") ("_" underline "
> <span style=\"text-decoration:underline;\">" "</span>") ("=" org-code
> "<code>" "</code>" verbatim) ("~" org-verbatim "<code>" "</code>"
> verbatim) ("+" (:strike-through t) "<del>" "</del>")))) 
>
> That would have worked for me but i understood that there are plans
> to actually disable these customization's in the next version to
> allow better portability. 
>
> If its not to hard It would be great to have a method similar to the 
> customizable emphasis that lets a user define custom colors of FG/BG
> for inline viewing. I am less concerned about exporting since at
> least for me i plan to do all the editing/viewing inline inside emacs
> (though it would be nice of course to be able to use it with mobile
> org and/or other mobile solutions for when we do field work).
>
> I will hold on with starting with the mammoth task of converting my
> Notecase notes into orgmode until the issues is resolved, i assume i
> should follow the mailing list to check on this?
>
> Sorry for the long email and thank you so much again for all your
> work, its truly fantastic
>
> Z.

I want to add, as one of the people that helped Z with this on IRC--and
as another person that made the leap into Emacs largely because of Org,
about five years ago--that I think there are a lot of users like this:
people who value Org as a tool that is tightly integrated with the power
and flexibility of Emacs and Emacs Lisp, who aren't necessarily closely
following Org's upstream development or this list (I didn't follow it
closely until recently, either), and who are more concerned with keeping
Org flexible and customizable enough to exactly fit their needs within
Emacs than they are about making it available as yet another plain-text
markup language outside of Emacs.  Much as my Gnus is heavily customized
to my needs at this point, with Elisp-based features such as adaptive
scoring and virtual groups that other news and mail readers simply don't
have, I would never really dream of reproducing Org outside of Org.  And
there are plenty of things that I would never expect to work in an
external application or parser that speaks the Org format (dynamic
blocks that run Elisp, for example), which everyone nonetheless wants to
have.

Perhaps a compromise could be reached on variables such as
`org-emphasis-alist' and others possibly slated for the defconst
treatment: instead of doing that, let's consider keeping them
customizable but include the default values in the Org format
specification.  Org users who are never using Org outside of Emacs will
never see a problem using custom emphasis marks inside Emacs, unless Org
drops the feature.  For those who know that they want to use their Org
files with some external parser, we could have an `org-rfc-check'
function that warns about non-standard values of things like
org-emphasis-alist and offers to revert them to the defaults (which
would be the same as the values in the spec).

What do you think?  Is this a crazy scheme?

-- 
Regards,
WGG