[Zope-dev] Future of StructuredText

[Richard Jones]

[courtesy cc send to David G, so if I make any blatantly errneous statements 
 he can come chase me with the Big Stick :)]

On Wed, 4 Sep 2002 8:01 pm, Max M wrote:
> Andreas Jung wrote:
> >I would be fine to have reStructuredText inside the Zope core (for 2.7)
> >and to deprecate the current StructuredText in the long run.
>
> +1

+1 but with the reservations below :)


> >Open points: how to migrate exisiting STX documents to reStructuredText
>
> Wouldn't the simplest solution be:
>
>     <dtml-var content format=rest>  ???
>
> Then we could use both interchangably.

One of the big issues is that rest isn't optimised. I don't know what the 
scope is for optimising rest, nor have I got any real benchmark numbers. The 
emphasis so far has been to build it to spec. It's potentially much slower 
than stx because the latter has been around for longer and therefore is 
potentially more tweaked. The ReStructuredText Document works because I 
compile the source text into HTML when it's written. Nice and fast, and works 
well in content management environments. In the above DTML tag usage though, 
you'd want "content" to be quite small or the performance hit could be large. 

I believe migration may be possible - that is, the parser half of rest might 
be mutable enough to make it handle stx blocks and other syntax 
eccentricities. That's a question for David Goodger to answer really. As I 
understand it though, there's ambiguities in stx that the rest parser might 
not interpret in the same manner as the stx parser. The docutils/rest project 
has an analysis of the stx format:

    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/problems.html


      Richard