[ba-ohs-talk] Augmented Plain Text (APT)
[rather than crossposting, I'm reposting here from the PORT list.] (01)
Jon Awbrey wrote:
>
>John F. Sowa wrote:
>
>Jon,
>
>Email is the least permanent, and one of the most annoying
>of all formats.
>
>> for thirty years, a long string of people have been telling me:
>> if you'll just rewrite your essay in style sheet of the week X,
>> if you'll just turn those graphical scribbles into a program Y,
>> if you'll just rewrite your program in language of the month Z,
>> if you'll just start your next list at the beginning of the alphabet..
>> and each time i bought it -- "hopelessly naive" -- that's my number... (02)
I hopefully won't need to tell Jon to change his ways one more time. (03)
As part of the process of assisting Jon in getting his email messages
into XHTML I've resurrected a years-old project designed to enable
simple authoring of XHTML from plain text sources, called Augmented
Plain Text (APT). (04)
I'll be including APT support in Ceryle, which will allow people
to use plain text plus a few APT keywords to autogenerate XHTML
that includes hierarchically-numbered headings and a table of
contents. An APT keyword looks like "#HEAD" or "#LINK", nothing
complicated. I'll probably trim a few from the spec rather than
adding more -- trying to keep this simple. I thought about calling
it Simple Augmented Plain Text but didn't like the acronym. (05)
The APT-enhanced sources can be stripped of APT keywords with a
script I'll provide (maybe within Ceryle, then you won't need unix)
so you can always get back to plain text. I'll likely be working up
some special facilities to handle email messages, and the output
will be optionally plinked as well. (06)
The preliminary APT 1.0 specification is at (07)
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/ceryle/apt.html (08)
Murray (09)
......................................................................
Murray Altheim <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK (010)
In the evening
The rice leaves in the garden
Rustle in the autumn wind
That blows through my reed hut. -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu (011)