The View From The Foothills

I’m beginning to contemplate extending and changing Notebook’s preferred markup for Notebook 3. The plan is as follows:

• Notebook 2 markup (nbm2) will continue to be supported indefinitely. In Notebook 3, you can choose the kind of markup you want to use, page by page.
• Notebook 3 markup (nbm3) will be based on nbm2, but won’t be identical. It will be extended (i.e., with support for tables) and may have other changes designed to make it easier to use, easier to parse, more powerful, or all three.
• If nbm3 turns out not to simply be a superset of nbm2, I expect to provide a translator between nbm2 and nbm3 so that you can easily update your old pages if you would like to.

In short, while I’m not setting out to define something entirely different, I’m open to making significant changes as well.

So…if there’s something about the existing notebook markup that you dislike, or something that you’d like to have, please get in touch! (Note that there are already quite a few requests in the bug tracker.)

I’ll give an example: In nbm3, enclosing a word or phrase in stars *really* ought to make it boldface, as that’s a convention most of use in e-mail and other plain text anyway. So nbm3 might handle boldface like this:

• Star-notation, i.e., *this is bold*, might replace apostrophe notation, i.e., '''this is bold'''; or we might support both.
• The older <b>this is bold</b> notation will be retained, as it can work in cases where one of the other forms would be ambiguous.

If you’ve got opinions, let them be heard!