Re: Duration Tally

[Carsten Dominik <dominik@science.uva.nl>]

On Jun 13, 2007, at 17:33, Eddward DeVilla wrote:

>    I'm starting to wonder if it would be useful to have a general
> format for properties (or choose some other word) to be associated
> with a heading or todo item.  It seems the heading is getting a little
> crowded.
>
>    Would it be reasonable to say that a list of non-whitespace
> listing following the heading with a format of "key: value..." are
> special.  (Or a table might be nice.  I like tables.:)  org-mode could
> provide an interface to get a plist or alist of them for a heading to
> simplify writing now features based on them.

One of the advantages of using plain text for notes files like
we do with Org-mode is, that you can of course implement any system
you like to store additional information.  Keyword lists, tables,
anything.

So the discussion must be about how you would like Org-mode to make
use of such data.  Obviously it would be easy to write (as you
suggest) a little function that returns all this data as, say,
a property list.  But then you would still need to use it in
some way.  Are you suggesting tis as a feature where some users
(those who can write Lisp code) write their own extensions?
That is certainly an option.  Are you also envisioning ways
how Org-mode should use this?

Here are tow ideas:

- a LOCATION keyword would be useful for exporting to iCalendar,
   this was already proposed by Bastien a while ago.

- We could allow the TAGS match to set conditions based on these
   keywords.  Right now, a tags match can say "LEVEL=2" to require
   entries with putline level 2.  In a similar way one could allow
   "LOCATION=Paris" or whatever, that would be something quite
   easily implemented.

Nothing of this will be in todays release, obviously, this needs
more careful thinking.  Thanks for starting this discussion.

- Carsten