Getting around div tags

Sat Mar 20 18:40:56 EST 2004

On Mar 20, 2004, at 4:05 PM, Lou Quillio wrote:

> I think it'd be useful to determine that Markdown views its purpose as 
> being internal to what we now think of as the XHTML <body> element 
> (which I think is already clear), and further that author-specific 
> contextual constructs must reside outside of the Markdown blob or be 
> embedded at the cost of forfeiting Markdown's utility within them.  
> Repeat:  you don't need that div.
>
> IMO, If nothing else, 1.0 should be built-out within these limitations 
> and then frozen (not the perfect term).  There could then be a 
> Markdown Plus or some such that contemplates the madness beyond 
> without wrecking the core.
>
> Cheers,
>
> LQ

I am new to Markdown, but I think this sort of sums up why I was so 
attracted to it - I want a simple way to do 90% of the markup I 
normally use.  (Hell, 80% is just the darn '<p>' and '</p>' tags...)  
Markdown does this fairly elegantly.  I am perfectly willing and 
capable to manually insert XHTML markup if I need something more 
complicated ( see my other posts about trying to get a '$' past 
blosxom/interpolateconditional/markdown in a code block...  ;)

I was sort of disappointed to see the posts looking at how to start 
adding id and class tags to div's, etc, as this begins to approach 
simply being another way of entering standard XHTML data.  Why not just 
learn XHTML?

Then I realized that simply because class and id support was added 
doesn't mean I have to use it and I was happy again.  :)

I agree that adding optional support for some occasional "advanced" 
features can be a good thing, but I wonder how adding a 
{:left-centered} tag fits in with the principal that Markdown formatted 
text should be readable in plain text and look "normal"....  I don't 
normally see such {:left-centered} tags in any every day documents that 
I read...  I imagine that if Markdown gets too far away from this idiom 
that many people will migrate to the next tool that rises up and tries 
to stick more closely to a pure  implementation of that idiom.  I know 
I would consider it.  That is precisely one of the reasons that I don't 
use Textile....

My $.02...

F-

-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at alumni.duke.edu

Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants
instead of like men.
	-Mortimer Adler

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