* Sherwood Botsford <[email protected]> [2013-04-19 16:05]: > * Aristotle Pagaltzis <[email protected]> [2013-04-19 13:30]: > > * Sherwood Botsford <[email protected]> [2013-04-18 17:20]: > > > (I wish that this was a toggle that could be set in a .mmdrc file. > > > There are a lot of things that I wish I could set in an .mmdrc file.) > > > > That would be bad for Markdown. > > Why? > > Most reasonably powerful unix commands have some combination of > command line or startup files to control behavior.
Because Markdown is a document format, not a Unix command. > At the present stage when someone wants something new, they have to > fork their least unfavorite version, and tweak it to their purpose. Exactly. Every time you make a processor handle a Markdown document differently from how a different Markdown processor handles it, even just by changing an option in some hypothetical config file, you are forking Markdown. Consider then what happens if after writing 300 Markdown documents using one setting for some option, you decide that you prefer to use another setting. Now you have 300 broken Markdown documents. Not to mention, you can’t exchange Markdown documents with anyone else very well, because their documents look wrong under your configuration and your documents wrong under theirs. If you did want to be able to configure how a Markdown document gets processed, then the only reasonable place to keep that configuration would be in-band, within the document itself, so that the document will remain self-describing; rather than out of band somewhere it can become separated or divergent from its document. Had you had to put your settings within each of these 300 documents, bloat though one might feel it is, they would all continue to render correctly, both for others and for your own future selves. In that sense, while the markdown="1" attribute may be less than great, when compared to a setting in a configuration file, it is still a far superior design. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/> _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
