On 2012-09-27, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
it's more than "a serious shortcoming".
it's a fatal flaw.
I have never claimed RTT to be a master format. I have repeatedly and specifically denied this. Lets go back in time and pretend I suggested ZML. Oh yeah, you've tried that. Everyone thought you were nuts. You got pretty upset about that. Reading that little sequence of posts was the _reason_ for RTT. OK LaTeX then? You immediately leapt on that as being dumb because no-one at DP uses it, despite the fact I only said that _I_ would use it. TEI, Docbook, RST. No, no, no. HTML then? Horrified faces all round. OK how about if we write reams of documentation declaring that there is only one proper way to write HTML? Been ongoing for a while now. In fact the only master format that has ever got anywhere is the worst of the lot, DP's made up formatting markup, so I guess it'll have to be that. No takers? Declaring _anything_, including, most assuredly, ZML, a master format is a fatal flaw from nearly everyone else's point of view. So I punted. It was and is the only available option. You get a better P3 that doesn't mangle the lines and uses UTF-8. The words and the punctuation will be right. You get something that is easy to diff, and you get something that is easy to build on. It is a subset of _all_ of the above formats because we will never, ever agree about master formats. If _any_ master format is a fatal flaw and _no_ master format is also a fatal flaw, then yes, I guess we have a fatal flaw.