Writing complete pages

[Ian Gregory]

On Thu, Oct 07, 2004 at 10:33:30AM -0400, John Gruber wrote:
> Frank Blome <frank at projectwizards.net> wrote on 10/07/04 at 3:11pm:
> 
> > > Just script the addition of a simple header and/or footer to the 
> > > result of the Markdown transformation to get a simple page ...
> > 
> > I thought about it??? but maybe an option in the script might be a good 
> > idea.
> 
> It has come up before, and I'll consider it. But it's more likely
> that I'd slap something together as a separate script than to
> include it in Markdown.pl itself.

I second that. Markdown.pl is an extremely useful building block
whose beauty lies largely in it's simplicity. Additional functionality
can more approriately be added to applications which call it than to
Markdown.pl itself.

Since I have never got to grips with Perl and am now in the process
of learning Python (my first Object Oriented Language) I will probably
switch to a Python version at some point - but the important thing is
that the Markdown syntax remains stable. The last thing we need is
for Markdown to suffer the same fate as HTML and morph from something
useful into an impossibly bloated monstrosity.

-- 
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/