Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints [LWN.net]

Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints

Posted Apr 10, 2007 17:02 UTC (Tue) by AnswerGuy (subscriber, #1256)
In reply to: Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com) by k8to
Parent article: Writing and publishing with Emacs Muse (Linux.com)

As the editor for "The Answer Guy" for the Linux Gazette (later "The Answer Gang") for several years ... my wife developed and maintained a Perl script that parsed certain "wiki-like" hints into HTML (as well as breaking the
mbox files into separate HTML pages, linking them together, etc).

It was never perfect ... though we slowly refined the "hints" and
her code over the years. But it did make the job a couple of orders
of magnitude easier then hand-editing all of the mark-up into it
would have been.

I don't remember quite when the first wiki came put ... but I know
we were doing her work on "JEMH" (Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints) before
I'd ever used a wiki and before I'd heard of the concept.

So, as you say, it isn't a wholly new idea. However I'm sure they're
being far more comprehensive than anything we ever even attempted.

Jim Dennis
(former Linux Gazette "Answer Guy")

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Jim's E-mail Mark-up Hints

Posted Apr 10, 2007 20:24 UTC (Tue) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

c2.com, the original wiki, has been around for a long time in computer terms, since 1995. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory

Of course, the idea of working with simplistic human-natural markup is probably much older, and relatively obvious, so I don't mean to ascribe the invention particularly to wikis, or this original wiki.

All I really meant to convey is that generating output from relatively simple structured input is not hard. Anyone with a bit of time can do it, and it's also possible to convert an existing system to handle slightly different input. That you can make your own is quite valuable, I think, and falls out of the simplicity of approach, which is one of the defining aspects of a lot of very tasteful designs. That is, you can achieve whatever you need without baroque difficult-to-read formats. Muse may be the bee's knees, but if you don't use emacs don't let it stop you.