NIP-XX

Out-of-line Styles

draft optional

Out-of-line styles are text formatting data not inlined in the event's .content field but placed into st (style) tags.

Motivation

With markup languages such as Markdown, AsciiDoc and HTML, clients would be required to add an ever growing number of parsers to support textual event kinds.

If keeping .content field limited to plaintext, clients can show text with no extraneous markup delimiter chars that could impact readability.

When a client chooses to support formatting, it can add parser code just once and it will work for all textual events. If the parser in incomplete, there is not much problem because the raw text inside .content is perfectly readable.

Writing Text

A client should offer text formatting in any markup language, for example, WYSIWYG powered by HTML, or Markdown editor. However, before saving the event it should transform the resulting text into an unformatted .content with added style tags.

Style Tags

A style tag delimits an inclusive character range and specifies a style to be applied using the following syntax: ["st", "<starting-character-index>:<ending-character-index>", "<style-name>"]

Style Names

h<1-to-9>: Header (h1) or subheader
strong: Strong importance; should use heavier weight font.
em: Emphasis; should use italic type.
small: Small print, like copyright and legal text. Use smaller font-size.
strike: Stricken text. Should remove leading and trailing -.
del: Deleted text, such as after a git commit. Should remove leading - and spaces.
ins: Inserted text, such as after a git commit. Should remove leading + and spaces.
sub: Text should be displayed as subscript.
sup: Text should be displayed as superscript.
mark Text should be highlighted with a different background color.
quote: Quoted text. Should remove leading and trailing ".
dsv or dsv:<delimiter-char-sequence>: Delimiter separated value. The default delimiter is |. Another delimiter that doesn't clash with the actual values may be choosed, e.g.: dsv:#-#. Values should be trimmed.
code or code:<lowercase-language-name-without-space>): Displays code, optionally in some language.

Styles may be combined, for instance, a dsv's header may have its char range set to h1.

Example

{
  "tags": [
    ["st", "0:7", "h1"],
    ["st", "10:29", "h2"],
    ["st", "51:51", "h1"],
    ["st", "10:71", "dsv"]
  ],
  "content": "My Title

  |    B    |    C
D | Item B1 | Item C1
E | Item B2 | Item C2

  • Bullet points don't need style tags
  • I simply used spaces to ident these
  1) Here too
  1.1) Example"
  // other fields
}

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