Re: Thoughts on the standardization of Org

[Daniele Nicolodi <daniele@grinta.net>]

On 01/11/2020 17:13, Russell Adams wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 31, 2020 at 08:22:01PM -0400, Asa Zeren wrote:
>> First, I would like to repeat the importance of developing standards
>> for org-mode. If we want to expand the influence of org, tooling must
>> expand beyond Emacs.
> 
> I disagree. There are other open text based formats outside of
> Emacs. That Org is so compelling is because it's tightly integrated
> into an Emacs mode which makes using Org data so easy.

I cannot agree more with this statement and a similar statement (that I
am too lazy to go search to provide correct authorship) that stated that
one of the advantages of Org is that, being implemented in Emacs, it has
infinite potential for customization, thus we would need to agree about
what org mode is before standardizing it: my Org is not your org, and,
thank to the features offered be the Emacs environment, I use different
flavors of Org in different buffers.

Reading the thread I have the impression that what wants to be
standardized is the syntax of Org, but that is not very different from
the syntax of other text based markup languages such at
reStructuredText, asciidoc, Markdown, or others. What makes Org stand
out, for some applications, is "org-mode" (as the implementation of Org
in Emacs) and the tools built on top of the syntax.

I don't think it is reasonable to expect much of org-mode being
implemented in another environment, because that quickly becomes a task
as complex as implementing Emacs. For example, Org has org-tables, and
the formula syntax allows for Emacs Calc expressions or Elisp functions
to be called: should an hypothetical implementation of Org allow the
same formulas to be executed? Wouldn't that mean that this
implementation needs to re-implement a good fraction of Emacs (or use
Emacs itself for interpreting the formulas?

Maybe the standardization should cover only the "static" parts of Org
(ie no table formulas, no babel, no agenda, no exporters, etc). However,
in this case, what is left is little more of a markup language with an
editor that allows sections folding. You can have this on top of pretty
much any markup language using Emacs' outline-minor-mode.

If this is what you are after, I think a much more interesting goal
(from the point of view of Emacs users and Org developers) would be to
fold back some of the improvements org-mode builds on top of
outline-mode back into outline-mode itself. This would immediately be
beneficial as it would probably make Org simpler and the improvements
could be actually be used by many.

I also think that, if you are in the position to choose a format to use
for collaborative projects, reStructuredText may be a better choice as
the syntax is simple, well defined, and extensible. Although, without
trying I don't know if outline-minor-mode can be made to work with
reST-style sections headers. But, if it does not, it should not be hard
to adjust it (see previous paragraph).

Cheers,
Dan