title: expermental zettel format 1
id: t-zformat-1
index-term: zettel/format
; this is a comment line
# And this is a comment line.
; order of these keyword entries is not important.
; cite: for citations to published sources
; url: for URLs to relevant web pages.
; rel: for relations to other zettels.
; parent: id of parent zettel.
; child: id of child zettel.
date: 2020/2/5
; time: 1830

; Body of note is not introduced by any identifier.
; All data items are optional.
format: text

This zetel format contains a number of structured one-line data items.  They are introduced by a keyword followed by colon.  The line must start with the keyword.  Keywords may be repeated with different data, so that there may be more than one "rel", for example.

Only lines before the note text will be considered keyword lines.

All keywords are optional.  If missing, the title and id will be automatically generated by the system.

**Unknown keywords:** The entire line will be ignored.

**Pros**: Easy to type, easy for humans to read. Easy to parse.

**Cons**: Neither Markdown nor RsT processors handle the one-line keyword entries as separate lines. Lines like that are supposed to be separated by blank lines.  But that leads to an excessively long note, and is irritating to read and type.

Presumably this could be handled by a pre-processor.