Translate <<x>> to «‍x» about ecmarkdown

[bterlson]

The issue with angle brackets is that they're element-like. <<x>> will probably be parsed as &lt;<x>&gt;</x> by the browser. It would be annoying to type <<x>> for sure, but it would also suck to have to use completely different characters to appease the HTML gods.

We use fancy characters in some places (like <=, >=, etc.) so I wonder if we can get away with just requiring people to paste in the proper character...

[domenic]

I'd be ok with e.g. {{x, y}}. Keyboard-friendly ASCII-authoring seems important.

It kind of sucks that we can't have EMD convert >= to ≥ for you either, hmm.

[bterlson]

I am not familiar with the relevant algoriths but a > with a space before it and a < with a non-letter character after it seem to be auto-escaped? Perhaps emd can use similar heuristics to know what unescaped < and > characters belong to tags and which don't?

[domenic]

Upon re-visiting this it seems completely fine to me to translate <<x>> EMD source into «‍x» output. We would of course not translate <x> or similar, but two opening <<s with some >>s within the same segment seems like a fine translation.

[bterlson]

The problem with this is that if the document is first passed through an HTML parser (which is the case for an emu document), <<x>> will be hard to handle since <x> will be parsed as a tag and the whole string possibly even normalized to <<x>></x> per HTML parsing rules.

If we require a space around the list name, eg: << x >>, it could work...

[domenic]

Oh, right... that makes sense. I mean, you could imagine a world where EMD is the outer layer before you get to a HTML parser, but that's a whole can of worms.

OK, reverting to {{ x }} probably. And deprioritizing.

[bterlson]

is << x >> not better than the curlies?

[domenic]

Whitespace sensitivity always feels meh... Maybe it's fine though? Maybe something to ask the userbase about after getting a bit more experience.

[bterlson]

MD is already whitespace sensitive in a few places (lists, eg.) and EMD in at least one more place (inside _), so I say it's fine. But I think this is basically super low pri compared to most of the other work items so lets wait on some more experience.