Recap syntax ideas for Markdown?

[John Gruber]

David Engel <engel5 at engel5.net> wrote on 04/06/05 at 12:21pm:

> Could someone please verify that these are the syntax questions
> we have rolling around right now?

There are a lot more ideas than just the ones discussed recently.
Bigger issues are things like:

Should we be able to process Markdown-formatted text within HTML
    blocks? E.g.:

    <div markdown="1">
    1.  This is a list
    2.  Within a `<div>` tag.
    </div>

would be turned into:

    <div>
    <ol>
    <li>This is a list</li>
    <li>Within a <code>&lt;div&gt;</code> tag.</li>
    </ol>
    </div>

Don't make me dig out my to-do list...  


> 1. Subsript/superscript -- Superscript seems to be acceptable
> (and easy?) with `word^superscript^`. People have asked about
> using a space to close it, i.e., `x^2 `, but that raised
> questions about properly designating superscripts with spaces,
> where enclosing is clearer, i.e., `x^2 + 4^`. Subscript is an
> acceptable idea, but the question is what character to use to
> mark it. (The Textile `~` has received one plus and one minus,
> if I am correct.)

This is an accurate summary of the sub/sup discussion, but I don't
know that this is a huge issue. I'm just not sure how commonly
subscript and superscript are used. I use superscripts on Daring
Fireball when I include footnotes, but then again, I might be better
off writing a new MT plugin to handle footnotes (which would include
both superscripting the footnote numbers, and also automatically
generating the id attributes to make them clickable links within the
article; that's not something that would belong in Markdown).


>     Is `H{2}O` in conflict with anything? Or even acceptable?

It's not in conflict with anything now, but I've purposely saved
`{...}` for future use. And there's no way I'm wasting it on
subscript.

One thing we could do is look outside the ASCII range. The Unicode
logical-or character is pretty much what I'm looking for -- an
upside-down `^`:

    

However, because it's a Unicode character, it's not going to show up
in non-Unicode-aware software. For example, it displays just fine in
BBEdit 8, but it shows up as a square box in Mailsmith (which
doesn't (yet) use ATSUI for text rendering (ATSUI is Apple Type
Services for Unicode)). So who knows if the above character will
show up in your browser.

As an entity, it's written as `&#8897;`.


>     Definition lists -- There has been discussion in the past,
>     but it seems to have been tabled for lack of an acceptable
>     standard.

No, it's coming.


> 3. Tables -- There has been a lot of discussion,
>     including questions of what level of complexity to support,
>     but I haven't heard/seen what the final direction is. Has a
>     decision been made?

No. But there will be some sort of table support for sure.


> 4. Blockquotes -- There had been
>     discussion about citing block quotations in the past, but I
>     have no idea if that is still in the works or not. (I hope
>     so ;-)

That's on the list for 1.1 too.

-J.G.