Interesting Issue

[Shaun Inman]

I've been following this thread loosely and wanted to offer a comment. 
I use Markdown on ShaunInman.com and I'm sure to back-tick file and 
variable names, so no problems here. Where I do run into problems is in 
my comments where I also have Markdown enabled. A number of my readers 
are unfamiliar with the syntax and invariably end up with partially 
emphasized, incorrect variable names in their comments.

I propose that a measuring stick of Markdown's syntax be whether or not 
this type of Markdown-ignorant content can pass through unscathed 
(without requiring escape sequences). It sounds like we already agree 
on that basic idea and the implementation is the issue but I thought 
I'd offer another reason/perspective to consider.

Cheers

.............................

Shaun Inman
http://www.shauninman.com/

On Dec 10, 2004, at 10:14 AM, Michel Fortin wrote:

> Le 9 déc. 2004, à 1:01, John Gruber a écrit :
>
>> Some people have suggested that Markdown should only allow emphasis
>> to start and end at the beginning of "words", so that you can use
>> underscores mid-word without triggering <em> tags.
>
> I just wanted to point out that such a solution wouldn't solve 
> everything either.
>
> 	The __GNU__ preprocessor symbol is defined by GCC.
>
> Here `__GNU__` is the symbol and there should be no emphasis, but how 
> can you tell? I think every bit of code should be clearly identified 
> as such, so this and the `PTHREAD_SCOPE_SYSTEM` first issue are 
> non-issues as far as I'm concerned.
>
> On a related note, the problem shows when you have a file named as 
> such:
>
> 	Please download make_me_laugt.html from another location.
>
> Believe it or not, there is *two* distinct ways of dealing with this. 
> You can escape the underscores.
>
> 	Please download make\_me\_laugh.html from another location.
>
> But if the block of text you are dealing with contains many cases like 
> this, you may prefer to write a paragraph tag directly:
>
> 	<p>
> 	Please download make_me_laugt.html from another location.
> 	</p>
>
> Isn't this more readable than escaping things? Markdown will not be 
> parsed inside the paragraph and so the precious underscores are safe. 
> Of course it also has the side effect of disallowing Markdown 
> everywhere else in the paragraph.
>
> There are two contradictory issues to keep in mind here:
>
> 1.	Will it work in most of the cases?
> 2.	When it does not work, is it easy to find out why and fix it?
>
> I think the current rules have a fine balance between the two... at 
> least for me. But it's true that number one is dependent of your own 
> usage of Markdown.
>
>
> Michel Fortin
> michel.fortin at michelf.com
> http://www.michelf.com/
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