Allowing loose ordering in Org files (Was: bug in org-habits)

[John Wiegley <jwiegley@gmail.com>]

>>>>> John Wiegley <johnw@gnu.org> writes:

> I spoke to Nicolas directly and he mentioned that a goal for syntax
> regularity is to make it possible to reliably read and manipulate Org files
> outside of Emacs.
> 
> For this I *am* willing to give up order independence of PROPERTIES. Having
> a customization option would needlessly increases the number of
> possibilities external processors must consider, and so I retract my
> request.

I've had time this weekend to rethink my feature request, and I realized that
even machine-friendly formatting is something I should be able to give up, to
have an Org that works better for me.

What has always made Org great (to me) is that it's a rather "light" overlay
on a plain old text file. What structure it does enforce -- say, the actual
syntax of drawers -- has always felt fairly "fluid".

Lately there seems to be a push to sacrifice some of this freedom in order to
gain efficiency and regularity. I imagine this is for the benefit of machine
parsers; but what if one doesn't use any machine parsers? Org never asked me
to give up flexibility for unknown benefits before.

It should be asked whether users want to trade formatting freedom for those
benefits. If it has been asked, I missed that discussion. So unless it's an
heavy maintenance burden to allow floating properties, for example, I don't
see why I, as a user, shouldn't be allowed to make that choice.

To those who repeat the performance argument: This is an opt-in only request.
It is not about changing the performance of default Org, or making files more
difficult to parse outside of Emacs for everyone.

John