Tao of the Machine

Hem, hem

Back after 5 days... been busy with work, and of course the new Harry Potter book. ^_^ I did manage to get it on the 21st, without pre-ordering. Granted, Borders and Books-a-million were sold out, but fortunately Waldenbooks still had a copy (I got the very last!), and Toys 'R Us even had a whole stack, I guess people didn't think of going there for the book.

Now some comments... containing spoilers. Highlight this area to see them. Or not, if you don't want to see gratuitous babbling.

Harry sure has an anger problem. Somebody in the newsgroup pointed out that, besides having a lot on his mind, he probably suffers from post-traumatic stress. I guess that explains his sudden change (compared to the previous book).

Uranus. Nitpick: here she comes with that Uranus joke again, multiple times even! We already saw that in book 4...

That's all. Buy the book. Overall, it's darker and definitely less childish than the previous ones. Just so you know.

Pondering a text format...

Silly working titles aside: this isn't trivial to write. To be honest, I don't know if I will be able to come up with something acceptable and useful; something that does the right thing most of the time. It should, of course, and if it doesn't, then it should be easy to override the defaults.

One goal is that the code should be clean. One might think that this doesn't really matter, as long as the format itself works well... but what if you want to extend it, or fix a bug? Then you don't want to look at a bunch of Perl-ish code.

It may be worth pondering what is wrong with HTML for writing text (because this is what the format, ideally, should fix). You cannot avoid learning a format's syntax; whether it uses tags or something else, special forms require special syntax. So, my format will still support HTML tags inside it, for the sake of power and flexibility.

Paragraphs (or rather, <p> tags) are a nuisance, though. They clutter the text visually; people (including me) don't apply them correctly (and use <p> as a separator, rather than putting <p>...</p> around the text); etc. Textile solves this elegantly: multiple consecutive linebreaks are considered to separate paragraphs, and the code deals with the correct placing of the tags. This is what Sextile does too. Also, single linebreaks (outside of a <pre> block) translate to <br>.

The above seems simple, but it's surprisingly difficult to code correctly. And there are special conditions. I don't want a <br> directly before a <pre> block, for example. I also don't like a <p> section directly after a <pre> block, because it leaves open too much space. But maybe this should be solved using stylesheets.

I am not sure if I want the _special_ *syntax* that Textile uses. Sure, it's nifty, but you can't turn it off (what if I really want to enclose text in *asterisks* rather than displaying it as bold?) and it doesn't always work correctly. Should it be used inside a <pre> block?

What about special quotes? Textile used different opening and closing quotes. I removed them from my local copy, because they weren't applied correctly. Maybe I'll try my hand it, maybe not. I'm not too fond of them.

Do we automatically replace certain characters like > and < with &gt; and &lt;? If not, it's a pain to use them. But if we do replace them, then we cannot use HTML tags anymore. >_<

And then there's the lists. Deceptively simple, but causing all kinds of problems. How do we make nested lists? Can we put <pre> code in a list item? Etc.

Even if I can find a perfect solution for all these problems, there is still the issue of the actual implementation, which will be hairy to say the least. But, let's see what we can do. Back later.

Update 1. The backslash may be a special character in Sextile. It can be used to escape things, e.g. \< would display as <, and the < wouldn't be seen as the beginning of a tag. This behavior should be turned off in <pre> blocks. To get a backslash, use \\, like in Python strings. I suppose this might be a slight inconvenience, but how often do you need to type a backslash in ordinary text? (Not counting Windows pathnames.)

Update 2. Totally unrelated: Yay, I got the Harry Potter book!