Hacker News Reader

> The source code of the canonical implementation is the specification.

https://orgmode.org/worg/org-syntax.html is the specification.

The problem is a lot of the semantics is dependent on one of a myriad of user's configs. As a simple example, TODO keywords, tag inheritance, etc.

You could specify what's vanilla default in the org packages.

For that example, there's a file-local way to specify custom TODO keywords[^0]. Maybe that can get into the standard, but I'd be Ok with with a primitive, vanilla specification for org-mode first as striving to support everything would ensure no projects form around an emacs-free org-mode anytime soon.

---

[^0]: https://orgmode.org/manual/Per_002dfile-keywords.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com