Jabber and YTex

Jabber RFCs 3920—3922

Today, the IETF published the Jabber (actually XMPP) protocols as RFCs with the Proposed Standard status. See also the press release on jabber.org . I am happy to see this! Using Jabber for almost 4 years now, I’ve noticed it has grown through the years and Jabber contacts dominate my roster since the past months. In my opinion, Jabber suffers a bit from decentralisation. On the lists I see a lot of stuff happening but nobody that controls it at all. The XMPP system is capable of so much neat stuff, I hope this brings back the drive in FOSS developers to work on Jabber, and the industry as well.

YTex

Working with Hobix and Textile a lot, I got kindof a vibe/idea yesterday. Looking at the source of the Poignant Guide I saw it was totally done in YAML to, so… What if the power of Textile is combined with YAML for structuring text as pre-language for generating LaTeX files. It’s not that I dislike writing LaTeX and want to discard it or something, but for rapid documenting, this could be really nice. An example:
 
 title: An YTex document 
 author: Paul van Tilburg

 sections: 
 - First section: >
     Bla bla, this is the first section.
 - Second section:
   - >
     Hmm, if there are more sections, heading stuff goes
     here.  I can do *bold* text and _emphasized_ text.

   - First subsection: >
     A subjection with a !figure.jpg(nice caption)! and a 
     table:

     | head1 | head2 |
     | key1  | 3.0   |
     | key2  | 15.0  |
I’ve started hacking a bit and so far the structure stuff is working out. Getting Textile to work for LaTeX instead of HTML is a different story. You will hear more of this… if it doesn’t work out, you won’t. :)