This is the repository for both the telml and the telml-markup
packages. The former implements a TeX-inspired data format, while the
latter uses that data format to implement a lightweight, extensible
markup format.
TeLML is a markup language I created for personal projects. You probably don't want to use it! There's a good chance it doesn't cover your use case, it's still subject to breaking changes, it's kind of wonky, and it's probably still very buggy!
Still want to know more? Okay: TeLML is specifically a TeX-inspired markup language that I created because I wanted a markup language that 1. looked pleasant to me and 2. was easy to extend with new constructs. As such, there are two layers to TeLML:
- The data layer, which defines how to map a source file to a simple
AST. This AST is not inherently associated with any particular
semantics, but is rather a tree with a particular constrained shape.
This layer is implemented in the
telmllibrary. - The markup layer, which defines a common set of interpretations
for various AST chunks. This markup layer is HTML-inspired and
therefore features basic constructs like emphasis, lists, tables,
and images, but is specifically designed to be extended with new,
application-specific constructs. This layer is implemented in the
telml-markuplibrary.
The data layer is straightforward: it borrows LaTeX syntax in a very
rigid, specific way. A document is a sequence of fragments; in turn,
a fragment is either a chunk of raw text, or a tag associated with
an alphanumeric name and a sequence of documents. A tag takes the
form \tag_name{document1|document2|document3|...}. In order to use
any of the reserved characters \, {, }, or | in plain text,
they should be escaped with a preceeding \ character. Additionally,
at the top-level, TeLML files are parsed as a series of documents,
split on double-newlines.
This generic framework allows tags to be inserted easily into existing
text in a way that's lightweight and natural-looking to a user of
something like TeX. This system is, however, more consisten than TeX:
for example, all tags have payloads, so standalone TeX commands like
\em are not valid documents; all tag names must be followed by curly
braces, like \em{}.
The telml-markup library lets you interpret a pretty standard set of
tags as HTML, and additionally lets you add new custom tags to the
mix. That library is less well-specified, and could probably change
radically if I decide I want the semantics of tags to change.
The telml binary (implemented in the telml-bin folder) allows you
to easily define your own tags using the Lua programming language. See
the documentation there for more details.
Nobody has asked me these, but I assume that if someone wanted to ask me questions, they would probably be some of these.
It's my party, and I'll bikeshed if I want to.
Markdown isn't easily extensible, and also it's fraught with edge-cases and difficult to implement in a new language. TeLML is extensible, and it's easy to write a naïve recursive descent parser for it in basically any language.
I know XML is eXtensible, after all, but—do you want to write XML by
hand? Because I don't. Yeah, \em{foo} is more heavyweight than
Markdown's _foo_, but it's also a fair bit more lightweight than
XML's <em>foo</em>.
Because I didn't know about its extensibility when I started writing TeLML, and now this exists and I use it and I don't really want to switch.
I have less-polished Scheme and Rust implementations that I haven't put online yet. I'm planning on using the Rust implementation for a project at some point, so it might show up before too long.
Get bent, pal.
This repository contains a cabal.project
file,
which facilitates building multiple packages together; this repository
had previously been used for just the telml package, and the
corresponding
telml-markup repository
is left but will not be updated.