🚀 go-pugleaf

Without wanting to comment on the socio-politics of the situation, and
with the standard disclaimer about coming late to the debate, I wonder
if someone would like to comment on what seems like a strategically
questionable technical decision which has emerged from the discussion,
namely to go for

1) 'formatting in the files'

first, as against

2) 'temporary highlighting'

in FSF's Emacs development (i.e. Emacs 19, 20, . . .).

This seems both technically (in the sense that if you have (2), you
can use that to implement (1), but not vice versa) and strategically
(in that you are then in the business of defining and supporting a
markup language to encode the formatting) backwards.

I may be reading too much into what has been said, but I understand
the implementation of (1) as implying that GNU Emacs was now targetted
on becoming a Word 4.0/Interleaf/TeXtures sort of application, where
historically the value to me of GNU in general and GNU Emacs in
particular has been its focus on supporting the construction of
end-user applications, not building those applications itself.

I hope I've misunderstood all this, and would welcome clarification.
--
  Henry Thompson, Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh
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