Re: [O] Feature request: simplify usage of special blocks (for beamer)

[Carlos Pita]

I would also like to elaborate on another aspect of this.

#+ATTR_xxx serves two purposes:

a. As a syntactical means of attaching extra information to
syntactically constrained elements (as tables or images). For this
purpose the _xxx part is irrelevant, only the affiliation to an
element matters.

b. As a way of differentiating between different sets of attributes
and thus dispatching the appropriate set to the appropriate backend.

In the case of special blocks, which are syntactically capable of
directly taking arguments, just as SRC blocks do, (a) doesn't apply.
This brings about the possibility of a syntactic shortcut at the cost
of (b). So, a general rule could be:

i. A backend xxx interprets the argument to a special block as if it
were the argument to an affiliated ATTR_xxx.

ii. In case of conflict ATTR_xxx wins.

iii. It's well understood (and documented!) that, by doing so, ability
to export to other backends (point 2 above) may be compromised.

Thus the user would take advantage of this shortcut only when he/she
is already stuck with some particular output format. Also, for users
implementing kinda DSLs, having this special blocks with special
arguments is a handy feature.

Let's add this to my list of suggestions as proposal (4), again
related to but mostly independent of the other ones, although it's
expected that something like (2) would have to be implemented in order
to get (3) or (4).

Best regards
--
Carlos