problems switching from 1.0b4 to 1.0 - summary

[John Gruber]

Ian Gregory <ianji at zenatode.org.uk> wrote on 08/29/04 at 1:27am:

> I just joined this list to report on my experience switching from
> Markdown 1.0b4 (which I had been using since March) to the current
> version.

Thanks Ian, this was very helpful to me.


> Things which change XHTML but not the result of rendering it:
> 
> 1. blockquote text indented 2 spaces instead of tab
> 2. "_" and "*" no longer get entity encoded
> 3. Block level XHTML tags no longer get enclosed by <p></p>

All as expected.



> Things which caused problems and required me to modify
> Markdown source files:
> 
> 4. colon no longer required to introduce code block
>    (had to delete some to avoid spurious colons in XHTML)

Right. I should have mentioned this explicitly in my write-up at
Daring Fireball. (Adding a note to that post now...)


> 6. Handling of parentheses in URL changed
> 
> This last point is the only one which requires elaboration.
> Here is some Markdown:
> 
>     Rough [transcript][1] of a 1999 talk by Noam Chomsky.
> 
>     [1]: http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Policy_(Chomsky)
> 
> With 1.0b4 this produced:
> 
>     <p>Rough <a href="http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/
>     Middle&#95;East&#95;Policy&#95;(Chomsky)">transcript</a>
>     of a 1999 talk by Noam Chomsky.</p>
> 
> With 1.0 it produced:
> 
>     <p>Rough <a href="http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/
>     Middle_East_Policy_" title="Chomsky">transcript</a>
>     of a 1999 talk by Noam Chomsky.</p>
> 
> Note how in the latter case "Chomsky" has been detached from
> the URL and interpreted as a title (and incidentally how the
> underscores no longer get entity encoded)

The underscores not getting encoded doesn't change the effective
output, but the parenthesis parsing is a bug.

The syntax rule is that link titles -- whether enclosed in quotes or
parens -- must be separated from the URL by some amount of
whitespace. In a link defined like this:

    [1]: http://sources.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Policy_(Chomsky)

that *should* be parsed as just a URL, with no title. I'll fix this
for version 1.0.1.


> Overall the coversion process was relatively painless, and I
> guess the syntax is now stable so I won't have to go through
> any more such exercises in the future.

I'm glad you found it relatively painless. I definitely plan on
maintaining compatibility going forward.

-J.G.