Re: Marking/highlighting text temporarily

[John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu>]

Rasmus writes:

> Hi Eric,
>
> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> *None* of the complexity is in the format itself: if you unloaded
>> org-comment, the comment links would be perfectly human-readable. All of
>> the complexity is in helper functions for manipulating them. I suppose
>> it would be possible to define some non-link syntax for them, but why do
>> that when the link syntax works perfectly well?
>
> Because [[comment:X][Y]] is displayed (by default) as "Y" which can be
> misleading as X and Y grow out of sync.  Perhaps I'm wrong, but I see no
> point in "Y" for a comment.  Further, nasty stuff is sometimes applied to
> X such as escaping spaces.  In addition, export filters cannot easily be
> pointed to links (you'd have to make a check on the type of link), and you
> need a bit more hassle to map over them with org-element etc.  Again,
> that's just my opinion so feel free to ignore it!

I would mostly use comments in a transient way during an editing
process. e.g. I expect my students to delete my comments after they have
addressed them, otherwise, they are out of sync. The only point of Y in
the syntax above is to attach the comment to the text as opposed to just
having an inline comment.

There could be reasons to want super good export, but my main use case
is in collaborative editing of org-source, and i would expect in the
final version for there to be no remaining comments. There are still
reasons to have annotations present, e.g. as tooltips, or file
attachments in exported content though, so your point is a good one that
funny things may happen with a link type solution.

>
>> Ah, that's a good point. cl-lib isn't necessary, just convenient, and
>> could be removed.
>
> It's only a concern if you want to advocate for including this in Org 8.3.
>
> Cheers,
> Rasmus

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