This is a companion piece to ``Phlogging about flogging (dead) 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.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Phlogging about flogging things
===============================

A couple nights ago, as I was writing my phlog [1]_ 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 language [2]_ roughly
based on Groff. [3]_

So of course I did *the responsible thing* and told him in no uncertain
terms that this was a terrible, terrible idea.

I intend to do *the responsible thing* here as well, and demonstrate why
using using such a markup language would be a terrible, terrible idea.

One might suggest wrapping the tags between identifiers, so they could
be spliced inside the body of the text, like this for example::

       /.em/omnomnomnomnom/.endem/

which looks a hell of a lot like::

       <em>omnomnomnom</em>

which would every now and then, force you to backslash escape legitimate
content, which is a pain to do, and a pain to read.

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.



. [1] : __ gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~uwu/thoughts/20190329-markup-market.txt
. [2] : __ gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~sloum/phlog/20190329-21.txt
. [3] : __ https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/

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