On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 1:32 AM, Aristotle Pagaltzis <[email protected]> wrote: > * Waylan Limberg <[email protected]> [2010-03-02 00:05]: >> And that's the problem, lazy authors have been relying on the >> existing behavior for so long that changing it now could break >> thousands of existing documents. > > This sort of laziness seems like a design goal of Markdown, not > a bug in its users. >
Generally I would agree, but in this case I can't. Going back to those original design goals; one was being able to run any existing email (that was not specifically authored to be markdown text) through markdown and get a reasonable result. Yet, most email systems hard-wrap plain text email as 80 or less characters per line. And then we have those of us that use plain text editors on the command line, which also hard-wrap at 80 characters or less. Reading a document in such a situation with 80+ long headers is a problem -- and readability is supposed to count for more than writeability. The original design goals also specifically stated that anything more complex that the syntax already supported should be handled by raw html. And, well, if you look at the source of his pages (add ".txt" to the urls), J.G. almost exclusively uses raw html for his headers. But that's not what I would call designed for lazy users. But, well, we can't change it now. -- ---- \X/ /-\ `/ |_ /-\ |\| Waylan Limberg _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
