Via Slashdot, Really neat interview with Vladimir Kramnik, primarily about his upcoming match with Fritz, currently the best chess program in the world.

Man, just noticed that there's a Memento: Limited Edition coming out. Boo, I have the original DVD.

reStructuredText

Check out the reStructuredText Markup Specification, the reStructuredText primer, and the reStructuredText quick reference.

Also, reStructuredText directives, syntax alternatives, the introduction, and problems.

Here's the homepage. Hopefully I'll reorganize this list later... for now I'm just noting them so I don't have to find them all over again later.

What's awesome about all these documents is that they're pretty much brand new. I haven't come across them before, and they're all dated April 25th of this year. What's cool is that it's not just me that's been thinking about this stuff. They've done a lot more work on it than I have, so I don't feel like that much of a tool anymore.

Also, the most interesting thing about their versions is that leading whitespace is significant (just like Python - the land from whence these people come). This allows them to do a bunch of stuff I haven't figured out how to yet, like making list items be able to span more than one paragraph, and nested blockquotes (which I haven't even thought of). It also allows them to make headers without having any special "header" syntax like I have:

the following are all headings:
! Heading
!Heading
!!Second level heading
!!! Third level heading
etc.

I want their source

My main goals with this thing are to make it so I almost never have to write HTML again for primarily textual data, and ultimately make it so I can pretty much write an entire book with it. Forget DocBook, I can output DocBook from my StructuredText source. Obviously StructuredText might not be appropriate for a book with heavy use of diagrams, like a math book, but it'll be good enough for what I might eventually want to write...

Testing, from an example I found from STMinus:
Write multiplication as 'x*y' and exponentiation as 'x*y'. - *mwa ha ha, my parser doesn't have the problems theirs does Oops, but it had a similar one Oh well, that's what escapes are for...

Write multiplication as 'x*y' and exponentiation as 'x**y'. - mwa ha ha

Here's another good list of problems with StructuredText as it currently stands, a lot of which I agree with: no 'o's for bulleted lists (though I might be willing to include '-', though probably not '+'), and making leading whitespace significant can be ambiguous and unnatural. Though I disagree with other of his comments - I don't like having "adorned" headings, for reasons I state here, and I disagree with making lists have to have more than one item. Sometimes you'll start a list and add to it, but only have one item to begin with, or simply have something that is a sub item of a list, which belongs as a subitem, but there's only one - these cases should be accommodated. I also don't understand what any of these people mean when they refer to "one line paragraphs". In my world, all paragraphs are one line (they wrap), so I'd have to come up with something arbitrary, like a "one line paragraph" is one that contains fewer than 76 characters. This problems document lists underlines as a problem:

The tagging of underlined text with _'s is suboptimal. Underlines shouldn't be used from a typographic perspective (underlines were designed to be used in manuscripts to communicate to the typesetter that the text should be italicized -- no well-typeset book ever uses underlines), and conflict with double-underscored Python variable names (__init__ and the like), which would get truncated and underlined when that effect is not desired. Note that while complete markup would prevent that truncation ('__init__'), I think of docstring markups much like I think of type annotations -- they should be optional and above all do no harm. In this case the underline markup does harm.

and underlining is eliminated from reStructuredText. Underlining is useful, my primary concern isn't Python documentation, and this is what escape characters are for. Watch: __init__. I'm keeping underlines

Smarty

Via the PHP Tourist Guide, it looks like the Smarty template engine is going to be getting a new home. It's funny that they took the pages straight from the PHP-GTK site

CSS generated content

Mark Pilgrim makes excellent use of CSS generated content on his weblog. He's the first person I know of who's actually used this, and what he did is an great idea.

In Mozilla (or any other browser), can I specify my own stylesheet for printing? I'd use this for anything I ever print if I could.

One Ring to Rule Them All

I just saw The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. It was amazing.