* Waylan Limberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-02-29 17:00]: > As implementors, we want a strict spec because it's easier to > implement, but that does not always result in easier to read > and/or write.
You have “strict” and “simplistic” confused. If the spec for the syntax is rigorous that does not mean the syntax has to be rigid. It just means it is well-defined how an implementation of Markdown should parse particular constructs. That has nothing whatsoever to do with the flexibility in the syntax. The current syntax summary leaves a lot of grey areas where you could reasonably do any of several things. The upshot is that the whenever someone implements Markdown from scratch, most likely his implementation *does* do something other than the reference implementation for that case. And experience confirms this. Therefore, I don’t quite follow this argument: > Now, before you all write me off as insane, this is actually > why I think Markdown 2.0 is a good idea. By moving to 2.0, we > don't have to worry about backward compatibility (Markdown 2.0 > should not allow those 3 spaces). You *already* can’t move documents from one implementation to another without expecting breakage. Heck, you can’t move them from one version of an implementation to a newer version of the same implementation without expecting some breakage. The question is, how much breakage would conformance to the more rigorous spec cause? If it isn’t much: do you think any users will care about the subtleties of Markdown 1.0 vs Markdown 2.0? Don’t you think they’ll blithely grind their Markdown 1.0 documents through a Markdown 2.0 processor if this works most of the time? If it would cause a lot of breakage: isn’t that maybe because a lot of people actually like this “unintended feature”? Does that not possibly mean that it’s worthwhile to try preserving as an actual feature in the spec? (If several implementations have the same accidental feature, particularly?) Remember, it’s always easier to change the spec to fit existing fact rather than the other way around. (Cf. HTML5.) Now if you insist on causing so much breakage that people *cannot* just grind their 1.0 documents through a 2.0 processor: what do you expect does this imply for the adoption of 2.0? Don’t you think it would rather cause a lot of people not to “upgrade” the way they did with XML 2.0 and Windows Vista? Some upgrades those were. Now turn around and consider the two calls you make in relation to each other. I don’t know about you, but it seems contradictory to me that first you argue for a spec that allows documents to be written in a very lax syntax, then turn around and backward compatibility should be abandoned so that we can have the freedom to reduce the flexibility of the syntax. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/> _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list Markdown-Discuss@six.pairlist.net http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss