On 5 April 2013 13:24, Richard A. O'Keefe <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote: > > On 5/04/2013, at 2:00 PM, Johan Tibell wrote: > >>> Would it be too much to ask that a notation be used which has >>> a formal syntax and a formal semantics? >> >> We will document our superset, sure. That's what others did as well. >> The point is using Markdown as the shared base. > > Nononono. > Sure, the others "documented" their supersets. > But they did *NOT* provide what I am asking for: > - a FORMAL SYNTAX and > - a FORMAL SEMANTICS. > I tried to use one of these systems, and found myself > unable to determine which combinations of features were > legal and what legal combinations of features *meant*. > I corresponded with some people who had built markdown > parsers, and the answer was the same each time: they had > reversed engineered some other parser (typically a Perl > one) and bashed on it until they were bug-compatible. > > If I want to get a particular effect in LaTeX or even in > HTML+CSS, I can usually figure it out *without* having to > run any program. If I want to get a particular effect in > Markdown, I flounder around and end up doing without. > > I am sick of "documentation" that vaguely hints at things, > and I am especially sick of Markdown so-called documentation. > > To say it one more time: I was unable to use the official > Markdown documentation, > http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, > to guide the construction of a parser. > > For example, <br> is a valid URL enclosed in <. . .>, so > is it a link, as the "Automatic Links" section would suggest, > or is it embedded HTML, as the "Inline HTML" section would > suggest? Can you tell *from the documentation*? > > For another example, is *foo**bar**ugh* supposed to map to > <em>foo<strong>bar</strong>ugh</em> or to > <em>foo</em><em>bar</em><em>ugh</em>? > Again, I'm not asking "what does this or that *program* do", > I'm asking "can you tell from the documentation what they > *ought* to do?" > > If there is an unambiguous specification of Markdown somewhere > (specification; not program), I would be glad to see it.
I don't think so; this was one of the big issues recently when people were trying to get Gruber to actually _do_ something with Markdown as there were all these corner cases. > > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe