Le 2008-03-03 à 0:55, [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit :
a specification will _eventually_ be used, by someone, to tell the user they are doing things "wrong", won't it?
Well, that's not the specification I intend to do. All inputs are right in Markdown; there is no such thing as "invalid" or "non- conformant" Markdown, and that's how I intend to specify it.
and doesn't that turn markdown's genesis upside-down? heck, next thing you know we'll be telling them to r.t.f.m.
The point of Markdown is that you can learn a good part of it just be looking at example and extrapolating from that. Reading a manual isn't a requirement, and it should stay that way. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be a manual nonetheless; when it doesn't do what you expect, you should have a reference to dig into, and some people like to read manuals.
i would prefer that implementers get more sophisticated about teasing out the user's intent in "ambiguous" cases.
The problem is that in many cases, the author's intent is ambiguous even for a human. Then there are cases which can only the only way to understand what the author's intent is to actually read the text and use the formatting in a way that makes sense.
Markdown can't do anything about these two cases, except for one thing: be predictable by having syntax rules simple enough so that authors understand what happens and providing an obvious way out so that authors aren't stuck with nothing to do.
of course, i've always been suspicious of "specifications", since many technoids think the job is finished once the spec is "all done", before one line has been programmed; give me _working_code_ any day of the week, thank you...
I intend to keep the specification evolving, and it obviously shouldn't be called stable until we have actual implementations of it proving that it works good enough. In fact, I plan to start with a specification very close, if not identical, to what PHP Markdown Extra does, except for the few things I'm considering bugs.
just a remark, intended to stir thought, _not_ a debate... (please do reply if you must; i'll refrain from responding.)
Your concerns are valid ones, which seems to be shared by some other people too. I wanted to debunk them. Please don't refrain from writing the list if you have others.
Michel Fortin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://michelf.com/ _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
