Re: BEGIN_SRC..END_SRC

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 6 May 2012 16:18:03 +0200 Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> wrote: 

LB> On Sun, May 6, 2012 at 4:15 PM, Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 5 May 2012 07:35:29 -0700 "Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:
>> 
DA> We discourage the use of HTML messages in GNU mailing lists.  But then
DA> Gnus/Org/Emacs goes and rolls its own simulacrum?  And then everyone who is not
DA> using Emacs for mail has the obligatory privilege of seeing the
DA> markup?
>> 
>> Yup.

LB> Free software is dependent on standard, or??

"The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from."
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 2nd ed.

Please realize Drew is grandstanding about two extra lines in e-mail
messages, *voluntarily* placed there by the author.

Now go read the MIME standard in its entirety and weep.

DA> (Note: I would have no problem with the GNU mailing lists NOT discouraging HTML
DA> messages.  My point is that we should not (a) discourage HTML and then (b) bring
DA> in some artisanal, Emacs-specific markup through the back door.  HTML and XML at
DA> least provide (more or less) standard markup that is supported by many clients.)
>> 
>> Nope.

LB> Which commonly used mail clients (outside of Emacs) does not support html today?

HTML and XML are a complex framework of standards and I'm willing to bet
very few mail clients support them fully or need to.

Drew was probably talking about MIME as a way to identify and tag
attachments, but has merged that notion with HTML because his argument
works better against HTML (meaning, MIME is not discouraged on the GNU
mailing lists AFAIK).  Regardless, Gnus supports inlined MIME
attachments and will highlight them correctly, so there's no implicit
endorsement by Gnus of either the org-mode or the MIME way to inline
code.

Very few mail clients don't support MIME, but the org-mode markup is
much more like Markdown and such light wiki-style languages[1] than
MIME.  In other words, you may as well complain about *emphasis*,
_underline_, `quote', and such ad-hoc ways to highlight content.

I hope this clears things up.

Ted

[1] e.g. JIRA uses {code:LANGUAGE} and {code} to indicate the beginning
and end of code blocks, while Markdown indents code blocks 4 spaces
without indicating the specific language.