Setext (Structure Enhanced Text) is a

lightweight markup language A lightweight markup language (LML), also termed a simple or humane markup language, is a markup language with simple, unobtrusive syntax. It is designed to be easy to write using any generic text editor and easy to read in its raw form. Lightw ...

used to format plain text documents such as e-newsletters,

Usenet Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

postings, and e-mails. In contrast to some other markup languages (such as

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

), the markup is easily readable without any

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a String (computer science), string of Symbol (formal), symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal gramm ...

or special software. Setext was first introduced in 1991 by Ian Feldman for use in the '' TidBITS'' electronic newsletter.

Purpose

Setext allows viewing of marked-up documents without special viewing software. When appropriate software ''is'' used, however, a rich text-style experience is available to the user. Smaller documents are trivial to create in any text editor. To prevent errors, most large ''setext'' publications are created using a markup language such as HTML or SGML and then converted. The ''setext'' document can then be distributed without the need for the recipient to use a HTML email or web viewer.

Multiple ''setext'' documents in the same file

Multiple ''setext'' documents can be stored in the same file, similarly to how the ''

mbox Mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of email messages. It was first implemented in Research Unix, Fifth Edition Unix. All messages in an mbox mailbox are Concatenation, concatenated and store ...

'' format can store multiple

e-mail Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

messages together. It was initially announced that multiple documents could be included in a single stream, separated by a special tag serving as a document delimiter. After several months, it was clarified that this tag was ''not'' an official part of ''setext'', and that multiple documents should instead be delimited by $$ appearing at the end of a line of text. Regardless of the number of documents stored in the same file, basic metadata can be stored about any or all of them by using the ''subject-tt'' tag syntax.

Setext tags

The following are the ten most common of the 16 different setext tags.

Standalone Setext files

By default all properly setext-ized files will have an ".etx" or ".ETX" suffix. This stands for an "emailable/enhanced text".

References

Notes

References

Implementations

setext2html.pl
— A

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

setext -> HTML converter
setextbrowser.zomdir.com
''()'' – A

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

which let you browse the internet in a semi-setext format {{DEFAULTSORT:Setext Lightweight markup languages

Purpose

Multiple ''setext'' documents in the same file

Setext tags

Standalone Setext files

See also

References

Notes

References

External links

Implementations