On Wed, February 23, 2011 11:10 am, a@aboq.org wrote:
ZML, which is supposed to stand for zero (zero!) markup
Not quite correct. BowerBird originally intended for z.m.l. to stand for Zero Markup Language under the impression that the structure of a document could be intuited without explicit markup. I believe he later concluded that /some/ markup was necessary, so he developed some markup rules which he felt a user would not recognize as such unless she or he was specifically looking for them, such as a certain number of blank lines before a single short line was a header at some level, and a whitespace character in column zero means word-wrapping should be suspended. (So far, he has not come up with a way to indicate an indented block.) He apparently believes that this markup is IOTTMCO (Intuitively Obvious To The Most Casual Observer), so the 'z' was modified to stand for Zen; you would understand the markup if only you spent enough time meditating under the Bodhi Tree. I like to think of BowerBird's markup as s.m.l., for Spousal Markup Language: there are rules, but you have to figure them out for yourself, and they are subject to change.