On Thu, Dec 29, 2022 at 05:01:33PM +1100, Tim Cross wrote:
> 
> <tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:
> 
> > As far as I am concerned, I don't think the feature is important
> > enough to complexify Org, but (a) I see that there are people who
> > really want it (and offer myself as sparring partner to bounce ideas
> > off) and (b) Org is chock full of features I'd rather not have,
> > but others need badly. Software is like that :-)
> >
> 
> I agree. While I can understand it is a feature some users may want, it
> certainly isn't one I'm interested in and I continue to be very
> concerned about the feature growth and increase in complexity I see with
> org.  I fear we are losing one of the best features of org - simplicity
> and easy customization for individual needs.

Agreed, so far.

> I find the straight-forward
> nature of a tree structure much simpler to work with than one which will
> be less tree like and more directed graph like.

Strongly disagree.

Both are trees (that's why I prefer to talk about "document model".
It's only so that in Org, only the first child of a section node
can be text, the following must be subsections. In "XML" you just
can intermix subsections and text (actually: any kind of subnodes).

Org is "asymmetric" in this respect: blocks can be mixed freely
with text content (aka paragraphs), sections cannot. But trees
they are all.

> While it is true the
> tree structure found in outline mode does impose some restrictions on
> the document layouts you can use, I think that loss in generality is
> justified by the gain in simplicity and consistency in other processing,
> such as data exports. 

I think it is misleading to cast it in terms of "tree" vs "non-tree" and
this may be part of the current confusion's source.

Cheers

[1] "XML" as a shorthand for the unrestricted structure of an XML
    document model. Then you can restrict it with DTDs, RelaxNGs
    or whatever.
-- 
t