Re: Formal description of Org files

[Eric Schulte <schulte.eric@gmail.com>]

Bastien <bzg@altern.org> writes:

> Hi Marcelo,
>
> Marcelo de Moraes Serpa <celoserpa@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> I'm creating a web app that interacts with orgmode files and allows
>> you to edit orgmode files on the browser. The edit part is not done.
>
> Wow, this would be a really useful tool.  Can't wait to test this!
>

I agree this could be very cool.  In browser editing could make Org-mode
backed collaboration with non-emacs users much more feasible, and could
greatly enhance current Org-mode/git backed wikis.  My only fear is that
you could end up implementing much of Emacs in JS.

Another option for serving Org-mode files could be an Emacs-based
web-server, for example elnode [1], which I just ran across today.

>
>> I'm quite good at Javascript, and I wouldn't mind hacking something
>> akin to orgmode elisp code and this will be what I'll do if
>> everything else fails, but wouldn't using a grammar be a cleaner and
>> more elegant solution?
>
> Can you tell more about what you mean by "grammar"?
>
> Back in february, at FOSDEM, someone asked for a description of the
> org-mode format specification.  This is still something that needs to be
> done.  Any stab at this (on Worg) would be really nice.  You can start
> anywhere (headlines, TODO keywords, etc.)
>
> If the "grammar" needs to be described in a specific format (more than
> just a formal description of the various syntactic elements of an Org
> file), let us know.
>

As I mentioned earlier in this thread, I think any formal expression
would be more useful if could be fed to existing parser-generation tools
to automatically write Org-mode parsers, or perhaps automatically
convert between Org-mode and other document formats.  I'm not sure
however to what degree that is just wishful thinking..

Cheers -- Eric

Footnotes: 
[1]  https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode

-- 
Eric Schulte
http://cs.unm.edu/~eschulte/