Markup: do we need a different sigil for display element names?

[mihnita]

[mihnita]

Comments migrated from the slides

This is {b}bold{/b} and here's a {a href="http://foo.com"}link{/a}.

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Slides comment, Mihai Nita (@mihnita), 1:24 PM Apr 21

This does not follow the syntax as described in the previous slide.

It is not a literal or formatted value or function without parameters.

It looks like it makes html a first class citizen, while any other formats will be second class.

I would rather see this as literals + custom functions. So that from the same string one can generate html, spans (Android), AttributedString (iOS), ANSI escapes (command line)

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Comments migrated from the slides

Missing standalone? For example {img ... /}

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Slides comment, Eemeli Aro (@eemeli), 1:30 PM Apr 21 (edited 1:31 PM Apr 21)

The previous slide describes the syntax for Expressions. This slide describes the syntax for MarkupStart and MarkupEnd. The syntaxes for these are rather intentionally different.

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Slides comment, Mihai Nita (@mihnita), 1:36 PM Apr 21

OK... I can go with that for the syntax. But the separation feels somewhat artificial.

This is the same thing, but with open/close/standalone attributes, and fixed function (which I don't quite like).

Why give them special treatment?

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Slides comment, Eemeli Aro (@eemeli), 1:40 PM Apr 21

Could you clarify what you mean by "fixed function"? I don't think I quite understand that.

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Slides comment, Mihai Nita (@mihnita), 11:50 AM Apr 23

The function that interprets / renders / formats the markup is not specified in this proposal. Which makes it implicit, and fixed (I can't change it, as a developer).

But it can't be just one function, because on might have HTML tags, and text-to-speech tags (SSML). We had this as a requirement from very early on (at least formatting & speech). And might want to generate HTML, Android Spans, macos/iOS AttributedString

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This seems to focus on HTML and ignore all else. Which means one can't implement / register a custom formatting.

And it is even less flexible than html.

HTML can use new tags using namespaces. For example the MathML & the SVG namespace.

But this can't, or not cleanly. Because there are conflicts, for example "sub":

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/sub
• https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml#sub

And how does one prevents conflicts with a new markup 2 years from now?

[markusicu]

I think we should define one placeholder syntax that allows

• a value (argument name or value literal)
• a function by name
  • possibly with syntax indicating open/close as discussed in issue #240
• key=value options

... and carefully define in the registry useful functions that cover known use cases. Certain things could be done by single-purpose functions that need no input value, and other things could be done by functions that could use a value (probably a literal) for different markup or styles etc.

[eemeli]

I believe that we've established that this has been resolved with the :/+/- function sigils.

[aphillips]

@eemeli I agree this is addressed. Leaving open now to give others time to review.

[mihnita]

+1 to close