[Zope-dev] Re: Future of StructuredText

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On 9/4/02 10:59 AM, "Chris McDonough" <chrism@zope.com> wrote:

> IMHO, the indenting hassle is one of the best features of "classic"
> STX.  It's a pain to line things up but it does make for very
> readable source documents.  I think STX-NG is a little better than
> ReST for constructing readable source docs; especially if they are
> long, like chapters of a book due to this indenting.

When writing books, however, you're most likely using an editor that makes
it easy to reformat blocks at the proper indentation level.  For a lot of
web input where you still want to allow some simple structure, indentation
is a pain in the ass.  I do it because I'm used to it, but a lot of people
just will type in a paragraph as a single line.  Most of the time, this is
fine in Structured Text, until they indent one of the paragraphs even by one
space, turning the parent paragraph into a header block.

The indentation in STX is especially annoying when trying to drop in example
code, most likely pasted in from another source, and having to then move
every line to the right level - thus, code that was formatted to fit well in
eighty columns can be tricky to fit into an eighty column source STX
document if it's a few sublevels in.  I still have to find the right level,
mix of colons and spacing, etc..., after all these years.

-- 
Jeffrey P Shell 
www.cuemedia.com