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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but this looks terrible.

This is an example on the main page:

  (p [Skribilo is a ,(freedom [free]) document production tool that
  takes a structured document representation as its input and renders that
  document in a variety of output formats: HTML and ,(info [Info]) for
  on-line browsing, and ,(lout [Lout]) and ,(latex [LaTeX]) for
  high-quality hard copies.])

...imagine trying to write like this. It's essentially the opposite of what Markdown accomplished, which was taking a bunch of human conventions which were developed mostly out of ease of use (table formatting being the one which doesn't work well IMO) and adapting them so they can be parsed into nice text.

Whereas this takes the most awkward possible syntax and completely ruins what you're looking at.

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To fix the formatting there:

  121:    (p [Skribilo is a ,(freedom [free]) document production tool that
  122: takes a structured document representation as its input and renders that
  123: document in a variety of output formats: HTML and ,(info [Info]) for
  124: on-line browsing, and ,(lout [Lout]) and ,(latex [LaTeX]) for
  125: high-quality hard copies.])

The numbers on the left are line numbers, not part of the code.

Just noticed that (HN formatting for quote embedding always surprises me).

But I did know they were line numbers, I just wasn't going to strip them out - my point was that the scheme-style brackety inline syntax looks atrocious to try and write, follow or manage compared to the alternatives when the target is "documents" not "programming". Documents are first and foremost about content production.

That line of thought requires us to take unnecessary and costly effort to deduce structure from content. For example, finding a date in an e-mail body via regular expressions or NER tools. If the structure of the content is explicit, we know what part of the text is a date and what parts are not.

While I do agree that extensibility is vital for a general tool like this (and Markdown isn't), I also think that it is necessary to make certain concessions to standard elements (like paragraphs) in a text. I think TeX and Typst get this right, for example, and writing text is the default, with light-weight markup for paragraphs. Both of them then have ways to still switch into "structured" markup where desired.

Also, just offering the ability to introduce structure does not mean that it is done. For example, I could still write

    (p [I write this comment on August 1, 2024.])

So there is the question whether using something like Skribilo would really save us from having to heuristically extract dates from e-mail bodies in practice.

> It's essentially the opposite of what Markdown accomplished, which was taking a bunch of human conventions which were developed mostly out of ease of use (table formatting being the one which doesn't work well IMO) and adapting them so they can be parsed into nice text.

That comes at the cost of only having a few hardcoded features and not allowing extensions, making it hard or impossible to write anything non-trivial.

I dislike defining a separate function for each link, but presumably one could chose to do that differently. Otherwise I think it's pretty nice.

I tried to explain to my wife why markdown is better than google docs and we gave up when I was unable to justify the arbitrary choices re: [this is a link](to some place) vs ![this is alt text](for some image). This doesn't have that problem.

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