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Comment by billconan | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for a good human readable format for my notebook app.

I don't want to use markdown, because markdown is very difficult to parse and I can't use existing parsers, because I want to extend markdown's syntax to support extended content types and revisions.

(I'm currently using djot)

I also looked at structured format, like toml and hjson. What I don't like about them is when the content contain a deep nested structure, the document will become unreadable.

for example, a blockquote can contain a paragraph and a paragraph can contain another blockquote and paragraph, etc

I can't tell if your format is practical for deeply nested structures.

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Why is markdown difficult to parse or extend? I am using Markdown-it for instance and use custom parsers to extend it with custom shortlinks.

some good reads on this topic

https://johnmacfarlane.net/beyond-markdown.html

https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2022/03-31-markdown-is-not-contex...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/

Hi ! Thank you for your reply ! I think the best way to be sure that Jesth will meet your needs is to try jesth-demo [0].

I think Jesth does a better job than TOML, YAML and JSON when it comes to nested structures or readability in general. JSON remains the boss of machine-to-machine communication, though !

It is also possible that my other project Exn [1] meets your needs.

[0] https://github.com/pyrustic/jesth-demo#readme

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34947927

thank you very much, here is my notebook app https://github.com/shi-yan/Epiphany

Exn does look very related.

Epiphany looks cool ! Exn does not yet support mathematical expressions and deliberately promotes editing of raw exonote text files.

It looks like under the hood you're using Webkit-like technology...

Could Epiphany embed programs like Exn does ?

My first version was something like jupyter notebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQjBhsC3oi0

but I don't run it anymore. The one on github is a rewrite and it is closer to notion.

I removed the programming part, because I feel that a notebook is not the best environment for writing code. It may be ok for ad hoc programming, but for serious coding, I want an IDE. I may create multiple files instead of mixing everything together in a single page.

> My first version was something like jupyter notebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQjBhsC3oi0

It's a nice job you've done. I hope you know about the existence of Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive articles [1][2].

> I removed the programming part, because I feel that a notebook is not the best environment for writing code. ... I may create multiple files instead of mixing everything together in a single page.

Exn does not mix source code with prose as in literary programming. You can embed on an Exonote, a program (developed with an IDE) available in your current virtual environment for example ! [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33249215

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34965910

I had a similar problem recently and in the end I went for TOML, encoding the path in the section headers (square brackets), avoiding any indentation.

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