On Monday, 11 December 2017 at 00:54:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/10/2017 6:22 AM, meppl wrote:
I think these are wrong criterias to estimate the value of
commonmark. Commonmark doesn't need to list anyone and doesn't
need to be listed by anyone to be a standard. commonmark is a
standard proven by following "facts":
1) whenever a language feature is used by all popular markdown
languages, it is standard
2) there are markdown features who are used by all popular
markdown languages
3) everyone can reveal this matter of fact - e.g. by writing
it down as a specification
4) any language feature published by the commonmark-spec is
used by all popular markdown languages
ergo: commonmark == standard markdown
well, at least, if the commonmark people did their homework
right
I have a more pragmatic definition of a standard:
1. Products that implement it say they adhere to it and defer
to it as the authority on correct behavior.
2. There's more than one such product.
3. There's more products adhering to that standard than some
other competing standard.
So far as I know, commonmarkdown satisfies zero of those.
Don't get me wrong, I think commonmarkdown is a worthy effort,
and is definitely in the running to be a standard. Certainly a
lot more effort seems to have been put into it vs other
markdowns. It is entirely reasonable to refer to it to answer
questions about whether some detail should yin or yang.
But implementing commonmarkdown in Ddoc is not what we're going
to do, at least for the near term.
There are loads of implementations of CommonMark
https://github.com/commonmark/CommonMark/wiki/List-of-CommonMark-Implementations the one I have written is not listed. That covers 1 and 2.
Also Markdown is not a standard, it started out as a pearl script
and the a short documentation on how to write text for it. It has
several ambiguities, leading to a lot of implementations do
things differently. So they don't agree on the authority of
Markdown. Which makes Markdown a mess because you don't know what
behaviour you will get from the different implementation. So that
covers 3.
And to add more, CommonMark on the other hand has a full spec
written and several test that covers the difficult to get right
parts of Markdown/CommonMark. I'm sure I don't need to tell you
the virtues of a good test suit.
Cheers, Jakob.
