On May 9, 2011, at 8:34 AM, bucephalus org wrote:
Sorry, but I disagree.
The success of Markdown is just not its flexibility, but its
simplicity and convenience.
There may be one good reason for the double syntax in some of its
features (like <strong> and <h1>), and that is history. If there are
communities that use different standards, then it can be a good
choice to import that in a formal language, because it integrates
standard conventions and that is convenient for (new) users. I am
not sure how this worked in case of the Markdown syntax.
But in a clean design of a new formal syntax, flexibility is a bad
choice.
If you want to design a new markup language that looks something
like
markdown, that's a noble goal. But I don't think that markdown needs a
"clean" "new" syntax; the existing definition combined with the
reference
spec defines the language well enough so that there are, what, 20 or so
different implementations that are essentially compatable, most of which
use their own codebases (instead of recoding the original perl mess of
regular expressions in $Language.)
*People use different characters for emphasis*
_People use different characters for emphasis*
/People use different characters for emphasis/
Be thankful that the archaic form of *emphasis (yes, just one star
at the start of a word) never got popular so there wasn't any sort of
demand that html markup languages support it. Text markup is going to
be ugly, just because that's now it works. a "clean" "new" syntax
that
doesn't take how people mark up text documents into consideration is a
syntax that needs to be taken back for revision.
-david parsons
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