Having authored texts in nroff, groff, HTML, DocBook, Markdown, ASCIIDoc, and LaTeX, as well as numerous proprietary formats and word processors, my considered view is this:
Let authors use the fucking tools they know and prefer.
Organise common text through translation tools. Pandoc is fucking amazing.
Formatting for final production is a separate task.
(Not without some irony, I'm reviewing a set of guides and commentaries on productivity and creativity in a few other tabs....).
When you are writing your most important task is to capture the gist of what's in your head onto a tangible medium. If that means fucking Messinian marble and diamond chisels, so be it.
The marginal productivity gains for someone already proficient in a tool are low in switching to something else, relative to domain knowledge.
The challenge is that you're then stuck with high-level, vs. low-level definitions and tools. Which is where the whole "what do I use for creating my documents" question ends up at.
Systems such as HTML5 (the semantic elements, not all the canvas and DRM crap), or LaTeX, or DocBook, are hugely useful here because their definitions are largely semantic. You write the structure, not the style.
After that, so long as a tool or language can produce ingestible input given an author's output, that's fine.
And, frankly, by the time you're worried about specific low-level structure, use a dedicated tool which provides that. My experience with LaTeX was that it was actually _amazingly_ simple to use for basic creation -- it gets out of the way. Paragraphs as linefeeds, rather than HTML's incessent <p> </p> pairs, helps immensely. For more complex structures, you can go back and add what's needed later.
Markdown offers a wide set of capabilities with the option of fallback to HTML, which again is powerful and a good option for composing.
Let authors use the fucking tools they know and prefer.
Organise common text through translation tools. Pandoc is fucking amazing.
Formatting for final production is a separate task.
(Not without some irony, I'm reviewing a set of guides and commentaries on productivity and creativity in a few other tabs....).
When you are writing your most important task is to capture the gist of what's in your head onto a tangible medium. If that means fucking Messinian marble and diamond chisels, so be it.
The marginal productivity gains for someone already proficient in a tool are low in switching to something else, relative to domain knowledge.
The challenge is that you're then stuck with high-level, vs. low-level definitions and tools. Which is where the whole "what do I use for creating my documents" question ends up at.
Systems such as HTML5 (the semantic elements, not all the canvas and DRM crap), or LaTeX, or DocBook, are hugely useful here because their definitions are largely semantic. You write the structure, not the style.
After that, so long as a tool or language can produce ingestible input given an author's output, that's fine.
And, frankly, by the time you're worried about specific low-level structure, use a dedicated tool which provides that. My experience with LaTeX was that it was actually _amazingly_ simple to use for basic creation -- it gets out of the way. Paragraphs as linefeeds, rather than HTML's incessent <p> </p> pairs, helps immensely. For more complex structures, you can go back and add what's needed later.
Markdown offers a wide set of capabilities with the option of fallback to HTML, which again is powerful and a good option for composing.
And there's value in simplicity.