[James_K]

This is an eminently solvable problem. I've been writing my personal website in a variation of HTML for a while now which is perfectly easy to write and read.

  {main
   {h1 Title}
   {p
    Paragraph 1.
    {{a {href google.com}} Here is a link.}}
   {p
    Paragraph 2, now with {b bold} text.}}

The nice thing about HTML/XML is that it's a clear data-structure, so you can essentially read it in any format you like and convert that to the underlying tree structure without much issue. That's why it's been so successful, basically the same philosophy as a lisp. Why someone would look at that and think "let's go back to a document with no clear structure" is beyond me.

[lelanthran]

You solved it with s expressions.

Replace the braces with parens and you can parse that into a tree with only a handful of lisp macros.

[James_K]

The braces are quite deliberate. Firstly, parens are used often in writing and it would be a pain to have to escape them. Secondly, it integrates much easier with the Scheme code of my site generator this way. I can write in a file, something like:

  (define (code-block file-name)
    {pre {{code {class block}}
          #(cmd "highlight" (thisdir (string-append "posts/" file-name))
                "-O" "html" "--inline-css" "--fragment"
                "--line-numbers" "--line-number-length" "3")}})

And it fits quite nicely with surrounding code. The mapping of these curly expressions to Scheme ones is relatively simple, though there is a special case for joining words to brackets.

  {a {b} #c #@d} => `("a" ("b") ,c ,@d)
  {a {b}c} => `("a" ("b") join "c")

[lelanthran]

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know what you were doing. I was just adding more context for those readers who don't know what an s-expression is.

FWIW, my first static blogging system (circa 2003) did almost exactly the same thing you are doing (except that I used `[]` for lists, not `{}`). IIRC, it was maybe 5-6 macros+functions (and some readtable magic) to turn every `[foo ...]` into `<foo> ... </foo>`, with support for attributes using `:name=value` syntax and a list of exceptions for non-closing tags such as `<br>`, etc.

I redid something like that recently, in C, and it turned out to be unreasonably larger to write than in Clisp.

TBH, these days it's better to simply stick to markdown, because the tooling is much better (previews as you type, tools to automatically generate the html, inline HTML for what markdown won't do, etc).