Bean markup design document
DRAFT (needs work or removal)
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Bean is an extensible markup language, with constructs for delimiting and marking up text, as well as syntax sugar for commonly used markup, such as emphasis, lists, and tables.
- prior art
- rationale
- element attributes
- nesting rules
- blocks
newline and backtick delimited
default backticks to containers — anonymous divs/spans - reserved tag attribute characters
. for classname
# for id
this will even turn paragraphs into generic divs/spans
if an element isn’t specified like[.class]
something for a key attribute?
that automatically selects valid tag?
[:lang thing]might make it code?
although that might mean human language
so forget about that - inline delimiters
backticks, asterisks
allow inline tag before delimiters as well? could be quite convenient for some use cases - headings
provisionally use 3 hashes for level 1 header
level 4 and below can use generic block syntax - metadata
- footnotes
- custom elements/components and extension
implementation dependent to start with
although i’d prefer a scheme or newer/custom lisp
use something like jsx components - disable elements with config
implementation dependent - namespaces/modules/imports/something
Prior art🔗
Bean borrows from the tradition of Markdown, yet is more obviously influenced by djot, AsciiDoc, and MDX.
Markdown suffers from being an ad-hoc specification with many issues. The author of CommonMark and djot has already explained these issues in ‘Beyond Markdown’.
While I was initially enamoured by AsciiDoc, I eventually realised that it has a lot of complex markup, and even more complex rules of its own, which makes it hard to implement and use. However, it does have some clever syntax decisions.
Djot is the format I find the most appealing, though it has made some choices that I believe could be done better.
The biggest power of MDX is its components system, which has a slightly different equivalent in Bean.