[vox] Multimedia Presentation Markup Language

[William Kendrick <nbs@sonic.neMAPSt>]

Ok, I took a brief look at Magic Point, and I must say, it's convoluted.
It's easy enough to use (as in generating slides), but it's far from
flexible.

Late last night I started thinking of better ways of handling text-based
presentation layout than the way MGP does it.

For example, MGP lets you define what style the Nth line of a page
will be.  Fine and dandy, but quite a bizarre and unintuitive way of
going about it.

In other words, it lets you use hard-coded line-numbering to determine the
style of the text.  Line numbers are based not really on which line you're
on in the file, but how many lines 'down' you are from the beginning of
a page.

It also lets you arbitrarily change styles and insert things throughout
the document by overriding these line-based defaults, but there doesn't
seem to be a way to 'go back' to whatever the default was.

For example, if I have a page that is generally left-aligned, and I stick
a 'center' command in the middle of the page and want just one line
centered, you need to specifically turn left-alignment back on.

If, later you decide that slide should be right-aligned, I believe you
need to change it _both_ places. :(


With something like HTML, you can do something like <b> this is bold </b>
this is back to whatever it was before I enabled bold, which may have been
bold to begin with!!! :)


So, I'm proposing a new language called "Multimedia Presentation Markup
Language," which I'm already working on (parsing-wise) and which I'd like
to create using libSDL (so that it's portable! :) )


Anyway... suddenly got busy, have to go!  I'll keep you posted on how
things go with this! :)

-bill!