Having trouble finding a word in multiple files

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2020 at 08:25:47PM +0100, Peter Flynn wrote:
> On 18/06/2020 17:20, Chris Green wrote:
> [...]
> > But why do either?  There are far better ways of doing it, e.g.:-
> > 
> >      They were playing //La Cantatrice Chauve// last night.
> > 
> > It's easier to type, it's easier to read, it sort of tells you what's
> > intended.  ... and it's "machine readable".
> 
> I perhaps didn't explain enough. Yes, double slashes for italics is OK, if
> all you want is italics. It's identical to <i>...</i>. But it falls at the
> first fence if what you really need to know is that it's the title of a play
> because that information simply isn't present. These are documents being
> stored for posterity: like a publisher's back catalog, you should be able to
> come back to them in a century and still be able to extract the information
> accurately because the method is documented, and not dependent on anyone's
> ephemeral software.
> 
But your <i> format doesn't show it's the title of a play either.

If you want to know it's a title or a reference to something then you
need something like reStructuredText.  That is still most definitely
more human friendly than XML (or SGML or HTML) and provides just about
all the hooks one can need for references and such.

-- 
Chris Green