Skip to content

Definition (Spec-Up style)

A Spec-Up Definition is a construct of the form [[def: {term}, {term alias}, ... ]] ~ {definition}, where

  • {definition} is a descrition of the meaning of term {term}, and
  • {term alias}, ... is a (comma separated) list of words or phrases that are considered to have the same meaning as {term}. They are not necessarily synonyms, but are typically what TEv2 would call form phrases.

How Spec-Up uses Definitions and Term References

In Spec-Up's way of thinking, a specification file contains:

  1. a definition list, which contains all definitions used within the file. It typically sits somewhere at the beginning of the specification file.
  2. term references, whose {term} part is one of the {term}s (or aliases) in a definition.

An example of this is given in the single-file-test/spec.md file in the Spec-Up Github repo.

TEv2 does NOT use Spec-Up Definitions

The reason for this is that such definitions only provide the very minimal things that, in the TEv2 vision, people would want to do with them.

The most obvious features that TEv2 provides that are not facilitated by Spec-Up definitions are:

  • the generation of a wide variety of (human readable) glossaries from the definitions;
  • generating (persistent) links to the documentation pages of terms;
  • extending terminology-features without changing the underlying (programming) code.

Notes

Terms can still be defined and curated in various ways, but that does require that the curated texts that define terms (regardless of they are spec-up definitions or specified in another way, e.g., as Wiki pages), are somehow converted in either