Markdown and Mathematics

[John Gruber]

David J. Weller-Fahy <dave-lists-markdown-discuss at weller-fahy.com> wrote on 04/07/04 at 2:03p:

> Maybe I'm being too simplistic about this, but aren't (X)HTML tags
> already ignored by Markdown?  If that's the case, why not just use the
> '<' and '>' characters?
> 
> Using the <>, the following would all be ignored by Markdown:
> 
> <mathml: ... Math expression ... >
> <latex: ... line noise ... >
> 
> Or, if closing tags are critical for Markdown's recognition of something
> that it should ignore:
> 
> <mathml>... Math expression ...</mathml>
> <latex>... line noise ...</latex>
> 
> In this way (theoretically :) a new delimiter would not need to be
> added.  Let me know if this would not work as expected.

I don't think this will work, because it's confusing XML/HTML-ish
markup with Markdown's own syntax.

The XML/HTML-ish way would be:

    <mathml>... Math expression ...</mathml>
    <latex>... line noise ...</latex>

But Markdown would end up processing the contents of those tags.
Markdown only skips the contents of a hard-coded list of block-level
HTML tags.

This idea, on the other hand:

    <mathml: ... Math expression ... >
    <latex: ... line noise ... >

would work, I think, but it's contrary to the way XML/HTML tags
work, and thus, I think, confusing. Or at least unnatural.

-J.G.