Square brackets & common inlines (was: [this] as a synonym for [this][])

[Faisal N. Jawdat]

> And people say Perl uses too much funny punctuation characters?

Funny, but also true.

There are generally three things I like about Markdown over all other systems:

1.  It generally does the "right thing" with existing texts (i.e. it doesn't break common usage).  My objection to using [] was in the case where it would cause existing text to break.  If that isn't the case (i.e. if breakage would require a matching link block farther down) then I don't think [] is a problem.

1.  It's simple.  Messy syntax is a problem, not to mention error prone.  on some level i need to be able to give it to my mom and have a useful site chunk come out of that (i'm working on this, though that's a larger problem than markdown).

3.  It is, in general, easier to use than the equivalent HTML.

beyond this i think there is risk:  to the extent that markdown is a syntax rather than just a bit of software, it's going to need to stabilize or have user visible versioning if it's going to take off, because people are going to be able to need to write multiple parsers (they already are but everyone doing it seems to be tracking pretty closely, whereas it needs to get to the point where joe random developer can write their own if necessary) and people are going to need to know that their markdown files work on "any" (at least, most) markdown engines.  this isn't a request to stop development, but i think it is a suggest that we (or john, or whoever decides these things) needs to figure out what problems remain to be solved in markdown, and solve those and then "freeze" it.

-faisal