cites for blockquotes

[John Gruber]

Fred Condo <fred at tincture.us> wrote on 03/18/04 at 4:26p:

> Seems to me that Markdown ought to recognize either format (head or 
> tail) as a citation.

One of Markdown's syntax's design principles is that there should be
only one way to do things, unless there's a very good reason to
support more than one.

E.g., *this* and _this_ both create `<em>this</em>`, but that's
because both styles of emphasis are already widely in use. Both of
them are existing, deeply ingrained habits.

Whereas with our cite attribute for blockquotes, we're inventing
something new.

I hope it doesn't dampen the general enthusiasm on this list that
my answer to most requests for expansion of the syntax is going to
be "no". But trust me, no one's paid more of a price for this than
me -- Aaron Swartz can attest to the fact that I've thrown out an
awful lot of code over the last few months. Whenever we came up with
a better idea for something, rather than support both the new and
old syntax, I abandoned the old.

-J.G.