Dear all,
this is an interesting discussion to read, and I think lots of clever people have made this an interesting discussion. So I hesitated to even join the discussion, because I am quite removed from current development and no longer feel qualified to guide it. Still, my 5c.
For me, it seems unrealistic to standardize Org in a way that make it desirable or even feasible to have *full implementations* in other tools. What makes sense it to have tools that can
- *display* org files in a pleasant and useful way
- *convert* org files into other formats, with some accepted loss of functionality
- *write* org files that then will function properly in Emacs.
Orgzly is a fantastic example. It reads and displays Org files, understands enough syntax to provide very useful functionality, and is decent enough to not change stuff that is does not understand and use, so that the files it writes are again fully functional in Emacs.
It seems to me that this covers most of what we can hope for, as a basic formula. No definition of Org syntax can fully know what I have done in my personal environment, and therefore will not be able to reproduce that functionality elsewhere. This is intrinsic in Org and Emacs, I think.
The efforts to clean up the markup syntax have been fantastic (thank you, in particular, Nicolas), and they have made it possible to have meaningful parsers like the one on github. And they provide a certain guarantee that the three items I list above will work, also going forward.
Now, do I want that an arbitrary web browser or email client understands if a file is org syntax, and that clicking on it should open Emacs. Yes, I would like that. So in that sense, a mime type would be useful, for sure.
Greetings
Carsten