(New) idea for your judgement, immo very useful.

Discuss how to use and promote Web standards with the Mozilla Gecko engine.
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bass7
Posts: 4
Joined: August 3rd, 2016, 5:24 am

(New) idea for your judgement, immo very useful.

Post by bass7 »

@Web Development / Standards Evangelism / Thunderbird General

Dear Thunderbird users and contributors, Mozilla, and Microsoft/Mac e.a.,

We have text emails; many people prefer that, and we have html. And Microsoft has rtf. There's nothing between text and html, I would like that, so, I'd like to repropose a thought from many years ago if you allow me, something a bit more than txt, and a lot less than html, a form of markup.

But I call it markdown, or perhaps txt+, so it would be easier to search for on curious and power hungry Google.

People who would still prefer pure txt messages in their email, can tell the server or their email programme to abort downloading messages when the %%markdown section starts, or they can tell their email programme to automatically let the sender (in a one-off) know that %%markdown messages will not be read and seen, because they will be deleted in whole.

Coming to think of it, markdown is actually right, because txt is (almost completely marked down bar _underlined_), and this very proposal is, because it can be absolutely minimal, while html is nothing or everything, and not separate, but (like other markup syntaxis) interweaved in the text itself.

One example:

Code: Select all

{Email header, something investigators don't seem to want, but anyway}

Hello Mark,

here's the time you requested, it's 10:15. Don't forget, it's very important!

Column 1	Column 2
tuesday 12:10	forgot
10:15	don't forget

Frère Jacques
cdec|cdec|efg2|efg2|
Frè-re Jac-ques Frè-re Jac-ques where's the beat, where's the bass

Yours, An

%%markdown

p2w11 b
p3 tab
p4 abc+bas
please send me the markdown level to be accepted, manually;
Or '%^%m' instead of '%%markdown'.

In this example, paragraph 2, word 11 ('very') would be set to bold font.
And paragraph 3 would be a table. (Tabs are converted to spaces.)
And paragraph 4 would be shown as abcplus, etc. (http://abcplus.sourceforge.net/) (I wrote a simple preprocessor which added syntax to abc+ level, that allowed something like this, I don't remember.)
(The message doesn't make much sense now that I added paragraph (3 and) 4, so I hope you don't reject this idea based on that;)
And something left to your imagination, yet to be translated (and shortend/readable) into something programmy.

So if you would consider markup emails, consider markdown.

Thanks for bearing with me. (Sorry for my inevitable side remarks.) Anyhow, have a lot of fun!

--Bas
bass7
Posts: 4
Joined: August 3rd, 2016, 5:24 am

Re: (New) idea for your judgement, immo very useful.

Post by bass7 »

Well, credit where credit's due; this is markdown (a well thought out mark-up initiative):
https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

Perhaps I should come up with another name, literally accurate or not, but I don't want my initial on it, such as markdownb or markblow. Blemming. Bimp. Brand-up. Bullsi. Baddress.

Anyway, I wish you much inspiration. I just had to address the work done on markdown. (And yes, I added Baddress to the list after typing 'address'. Honestly, I like it, but you're free to still judge this whole idea. It's yours to do justice.)

Daringfireball.net is invited too. :)

--Bas
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Frenzie
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Joined: May 5th, 2004, 10:40 am
Location: Belgium
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Re: (New) idea for your judgement, immo very useful.

Post by Frenzie »

Note that Markdown has several extensions. I do my writing in Pandoc Markdown when I can afford to: http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_ ... kdown.html (see here for details)

There's also the unrelated but similar Zim syntax. I use Zim for digital notetaking.
Intelligent alien life does exist, otherwise they would have contacted us.
bass7
Posts: 4
Joined: August 3rd, 2016, 5:24 am

Re: (New) idea for your judgement, immo very useful.

Post by bass7 »

That's good. I wouldn't mind such a parser in Thunderbird! Thank you for your suggestion; some of the elements would be acceptable to even the most pure text receipiens.

* The bullet list I already use quite often.
* Though it might conflict with *bold* in readability.

And, I do have already issues with turning my own thoughts into something readable. (I do learn a bit from MasterChef though! Excellent show imo. Not good enough, but I'm getting there;)

--Bas

“Do use the [Preview]!” - my quote for the day
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