Re: [Docutils-users] Audio tag

[Guenter M. <mi...@us...>]

On 2025-07-18, Schimon Jehudah via Docutils-users wrote:
> Good afternoon.

> Is there any intention to add more tags, such as audio and video?

> I did read the object and video reference.

> https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#footnote-reference-1

> I do know that it is possible to add raw HTML code.

> https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html#raw-data-pass-through

> I think, that having these settled more explicitly would be best,
> especially for Atom/RSS attachments (i.e. enclosures).

> Please advise.

It seems you are looking at reStructuredText as a kind of 
"HTML-input-language".
However, the underlying document model differs from HTML in both, element
set and structure: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/doctree.html.
While reStructuredText documents can be converted to HTML, this is not the
only output format.

There is no plan to provide input methods for every HTML element/tag in
"stock rST".
Especially not for elements that do not have an analogon in other supported
output formats like LaTeX/PDF, ODT, or man pages (roff).

OTOH, there is this syntax construct called "directive"
(https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#directives)
whith a set of widely supported standard directives
(https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/directives.html).
These include a directive to include images into the output document, as
images are widely used to aide in documentation and supported by most output
formats (with limitations). For HTML, this includes moving images.

Directives are an extension mechanism, so applications can add their own
directives (see, e.g. Sphinx for a large set of additional directives).
The downside is, that documents using custom directives cannot be handled by
the "vanilla" Docutils tools.

Günter