
Markup Macro Processor - dangerman
https://billwadge.wordpress.com/2020/03/08/markup-macro-processor/
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crooked-v
'Not many people use markup' seems to overlook Wikipedia, which is probably
the great mass use of markup by ordinary people today. It's a shame that it's
so gross to work with, though.

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mdszy
"Markup? Who uses markup?

Not many people any more, Markdown being a small exception. Although you can
also count Latex with its macros as a kind of markup."

yeah there's this weird old thing called Hyper Text Markup Language that I
hear isn't used for anything anymore.

~~~
hinkley
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

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kjhughes
TLDR: Author's disregard of the history of markup languages leads him to
design his own for unconvincing reasons.

    
    
        Originally, markup seemed like a great idea.
    

Originally and currently, markup languages represent documents very well.

    
    
        However those days are gone.
    

No, all that's gone are the late 1990's / early 2000's irrational overreach
and misapplication of markup languages to RPC (e.g. SOAP), build configuration
(e.g. ant), etc.

    
    
        The main reason that Good Old Fashioned Markup (GOFM)
        has been abandoned is that traditional systems have 
        no abstraction mechanism.
    

Established markup languages have not been abandoned for representing
documents.

    
    
        There’s nothing corresponding to functions (in a
        functional language) or methods (in an OO language).
    

Descriptive markup languages (e.g. XML, HTML, etc) have no such functional or
procedural abstraction mechanism by design. Procedural markup languages (e.g.
PostScript, troff, TeX, etc) do, but the article offers no clear statement
regarding how _Markup Macro Processor (MPP)_ improves on existing mechanisms.

Absent in general are any explanation of where MPP fits in this space and any
justification of why MPP merits consideration presently.

    
    
        There’s XSLT and other proposals but they’re so complex 
        they’re not suitable for non-techies, in my opinion.
    

XSLT is wonderfully powerful for transforming XML but was never intended to be
"suitable for non-techies."

    
    
        [...]
    

The article goes on to describe a templating system for the author's non-
standard markup language that appears to blend JavaScript, CSS, and DOM
manipulation. No attempt is made to describe its advantages over React's JSX
-- JSX isn't even mentioned.

At this point, I moved on (and regretted the little consideration already
given). A new markup language has a high hurdle to clear to justify
consideration in 2020. I see nothing new and nothing of value here over
existing, official or de facto standard markup languages or templating
systems.

