This is a companion piece to ``Phlogging about flogging things``. Please read both. It'll make a lot more sense if you do. This is sort of a response to sloum with regards to his groff-inspired markup language for that gopher superset research project thingadoodle. It's based on my very limited understanding of groff, which is that it will attempt to string things together regardless of the formatting, unless it detects a valid tag, in which case it executes that macro and goes back to stringing things together. The language as described by sloum is underspecified so I -conveniently- assume that some black magic is supposed to happen under the hood to handle ambiguous cases. I may or may not disregard this entirely if it serves my point. Yes, yes, that's the joke. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .em Phlogging about flogging (dead) things ====================================== .endem .nl 1 A couple nights ago, as I was writing my .link phlog -> gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~uwu/thoughts/20190329-markup-market.txt about that half-arsed subset of reStructuredText I gimmicked up to illustrate why some basic, human-readable formatting, would be nice, sloum told me they'd been tinkering with their own markup .link language -> gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~sloum/phlog/20190329-21.txt roughly based on .link Groff -> https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ . .nl 1 So of course I did .em the responsible thing .endem and told him in no uncertain terms that this was a terrible, terrible idea. .nl 1 I intend to do .em the responsible thing .endem here as well, and demonstrate why using such a markup language would be a terrible, terrible idea. .nl 1 One might suggest wrapping the tags between identifiers, so they could be spliced inside the body of the text, like this for example: .nl 1 .hs 8 .pre /.em/omnomnomnomnom/.endem/ .endpre .nl 1 which looks a hell of a lot like: .nl1 .hs 8 .pre omnomnomnom .endpre .nl 1 which would every now and then, force you to backslash escape legitimate content, which is a pain to do, and a pain to read. .nl 1 Now of course, if the intent is for the file to be rendered and never read as plaintext, it makes a lot more sense, but then one has to wonder what those files are supposed to be read with or on, what the constraints associated with that medium are and whether it might be better to use something else altogether.