[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] Fmark markup language

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 18/09/2012, at 3:57 PM, José Lopes wrote:
> The problem with Fmark is also its greatest feature. While other markup languages
> introduce special syntactic characters to give meaning to the document's elements,
> I would like to take a different approach: I want to use characters that people already
> use in document writing to achieve the same result. For example, in Mediawiki a
> heading is some text surrounded by equal signs. But in Fmark a heading is simply some
> text that does not end in a punctuation character, such as period or an exclamation mark.
> I argue that this is a more "natural" approach.

The problem with that is that some people DO end some headings with
a full stop; for them your special syntax is not natural.
> 
> I want to find a natural way of not burdening the user with the task of having to learn
> some special syntax in order to write a document.

You haven't found it.  What you *have* is very special syntax expressed using
several methods, AND IT IS NOT DOCUMENTED.  I have read the examples, and I can
find nothing explaining what the syntax is.

For example, I find indenting subsections rather unnatural and error-prone.
(For example, moving a paragraph from a deep location to a shallow one would
create a new subsection unintentionally.)
Is the amount of indentation fixed?  How many levels of subsections are
supported?  What if I want to use indentation to express quotation instead?
How do I embed source code?  How can you get an example of Fmark in an
Fmark document without having it acted on?  I could go on and on with
questions about syntax.