Try to clarify that SILE doesn't require a custom input language

[alerque]

This PR is because I've been a bit frustrated with chatter abut Typst and folks comparing it to SILE without having any idea what they are talking about. Don't get me wrong Typst has done some things right and other things well. Of course it also does some things poorly or not at all. Sometimes it just makes significantly different design choices and that's fine (e.g. sandboxing everything so documents are "safe" and cannot read the network or write to files at render time vs. SILE that just lets you have a full featured programming language ecosystem and treats documents as unsafe programs).

On the other hand it feels bad to be put down for things that just aren't true. Our documentation is a contributing factor to that confusion.

One of the most egregious issues brought up several times is that (supposedly) Typist uses a generic input language "based on Markdown" while SILE "requires everything to be written in a custom input language". In fact the exact opposite is true. Typst is the one that invented a Turing complete custom input language, while SILE is the one uses generic off the shelf components like XML for input and Lua for programability. And SILE is the one that can actually process Markdown. The Typst language has similarities to Markdown that it was derived from, but it's not interchangeable at all. SILE is. The SIL input syntax is there as an easier to type XML alternative, but certainly not required in any way.

</end rant>

[Omikhleia]

@alerque I wholly agree, and I have no rant against Typst (I haven't tried it yet, actually) -- but I also came to the same conclusion as you: the SIL language is perhaps made too prominent; many people do not read past that point and assume SIL to be the only choice.

E.g. the "Are We Digital Yet" website lists SILE has having a "custom language", which I tried discussing notably here: tajpulo/arewedigitaltypesettingyet.com#3 -- One of the appeal of SILE for me is that it's made in such a way that it can virtually process any language with an appropriate "inputter", and that everything being replaceable, one can add such inputters at will (and this is even made simpler now since 0.13 and 0.14 where you revisited the object model etc.)

So SILE comes with SIL "TeX-like" and SIL "XML-flavored" by default, but it's quite language agnostic by nature - After all, indeed, we have existing solutions for Markdown, Djot, even raw Pandoc AST JSON.... And subsets of big XML schemas: DocBook (far from complete but it shows some way), TEI¹ etc.

Footnotes

1. I've back pain issues currently due to a bad fall, so I haven't been very prolific lately -- Can't stay too long sitting and typing -- but one of my latest projects deals with another subset of TEI (different from the dictionary subset). Slowly but surely, I'll made it public when I can return to it decently ^^ ;) ↩

[alerque]

Just to be clear, my rant was not against Typst itself or the developer community, it was much more against bystanders commenting on typesetters from the sidelines without any clear understanding of what they are talking about. Maybe I should just stay off Hackernews, Lobste.rs, et al.

[Omikhleia]

Maybe I should just stay off Hackernews, Lobste.rs, et al.

Heh :p ... Maybe I should stay away from some Typst-related documents too:
#1729 (reply in thread)

Grins