Re: [RFC] Document level property drawer

[Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>]

Gustav,

There are a lot of deprecation recommendations in your attached
document:

> I propose to depricate property-keywords
> I propose to depricate the Options-keyword
> I propose to relabel these keywords as document keywords
> I propose to depricate the #+CATEGORY syntax
> I propose to depricate the #+FILETAGS syntax
> I propose to depricate the #+COLUMNS syntax
> I propose to depricate the #+ARCHIVE syntax
> I propose to depricate the TODO-keywords
> I propose to depricate the priorities-keyword
> I propose to depricate the tags-keyword
> I propose to depricate the link-keyword
> I propose to depricate the constants-keyword
> I propose to depricate the setupfile-keyword
> I propose to depricate the Macro-keyword

The thoroughness of your investigation is admirable.

However, I propose that we don't deprecate any of those.  Org has been
around for over a decade now.  Such drastic changes would not serve
users well.

Note that I'm taking your use of the word "deprecate" to mean what
it's expected to mean in this context: that the software developers
recommend against using it, with the intention to eventually remove
support for the feature.  We shouldn't be removing any such features
from Org.

Not only would it not serve users well, but it would make the software
much more complicated.  As it stands, finding, e.g. a #+CATEGORY:
keyword and getting its value is as simple as:

    (save-excursion
      (goto-char (point-min))
      (when (re-search-forward (rx bol "#+CATEGORY:" (1+ blank)
                                   (group (1+ nonl)))
                               nil t)
        (match-string 1)))

Hiding those keywords in drawers means that either:

a) Eligible drawers must be located, and then the desired
property must be searched for inside of them.

b) Possibly valid properties must be located, and each one must be
confirmed to be inside an eligible drawer.

What benefit would this added complexity serve?  To put the keywords
in one place in the document?  There are already multiple ways to
achieve that.

I can't emphasize enough how important stability and consistency is
for Org and its file formats right now.  As I've said, there are new
implementations in development, which have the potential to bring a
lot of publicity and new users to Org.  For example, this one was
mentioned on a Hacker News post a few days ago:

https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

In the same HN post were examples of implementations for Vim and
VSCode.  Already, especially in the VSCode ones, there were apparent
incompatibilities in their implementations of the Org file format.

As well, there are now parsers in JavaScript, Python, and Rust.

Markdown is by far the most popular plain-text format, and has been
for years, but it has long suffered from competing, slightly
incompatible flavors and implementations.  Reddit has theirs, GitHub
has theirs, etc.

Org's file format may finally be gaining some momentum.  Let's not
jeopardize Org's chances by making implementors' job more difficult
than it already is.