Structured TeXt

A generic name for the class of simple Markup Languages for authoring text while preserving/indicating structure.

EMJ (2015-04-16) This is all a bit misleading:

the page title

Writing "TeXt" like that seems to suggest some sort of relationship to TeX, which there isn't.

restructured text

Google this today and the entire first page of results are about something which is not this subject at all!

RestructuredText

This is something that Zope used to talk about, but apparently don't any more (the link lower down this page is dead and a search on the Zope site has never heard of it).

reStructuredText

This (one word!) is part of Docutils and has the Zope thing as an ancestor.

CMcC explained in the Tcl chatroom: "There are a lot of variants on STX, and there'll be a lot more, but they all share a couple of characteristics (e.g., significant blank lines, leading space for indenting, * for unordered list, etc.). Some people from Python are trying to come up with a canonical STX. I'm tracking their work, and adapting it."

RS earlier made up the name "WikiML", which he thought might be a bit more intuitive... See Wiki format to HTML for a simple converter.

CMcC was thinking that .wml is already a well known file extension, where StructuredTeXt makes a reasonable .stx file extension, also the Python crowd seems to have a fair bit of work on the concept, and they've used StructuredText fairly widely. Certainly googling structured text will get you further than wiki markup language, and I think these markup languages are of more general strategic value than its use only on wikis.

It should be possible to upcast pure HTML to a sufficiently powerful StructuredText. This would represent a great increase in signal-to-noise ratio, and amplify structure while attenuating pointless presentation. -- CMcC

Examples/Implementations

• The language used in editing TIPs is also a variant of STX.
• The Wikit language used to edit pages here (see Formatting Rules)
• I've written a pretty slick implementation of a wiki-like Structured Text translator, here [L1 ][Bad URL 2011-07-05] - CMcC 22Apr2005
• Presumably the first Wiki Markup Language: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiMarkupLanguage

References/Links

• http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/introduction.html has some good thinking about the subject, courtesy of Python. I don't necessarily agree with their outcomes, but they're working toward a formal definition of the language, which IMHO is a good thing. - CMcC
• http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/STX here's another good intro to the general concept.
• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyDoesntWikiDoHtml talks about the value of a simpler markup language (than HTML, and presumably XML and SGML) for authoring documents.