Automatic creation of DIVs

[jmutchek-markdown at martiansoftware.com]

> On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 11:44:36 -0500, Lou Quillio <public at quillio.com>
> wrote:
> > But I'm not sure how a `<div>` syntax would square with this: "... the
> > single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown?s syntax is the format
> > of plain text email."
> 
> Secondly, I agree with you.  I've never seen sidebars in plain text
> email, and I can't imagine someone needing to use a sidebar in plain
> text email.  It's just not that kind of medium.
> 

All great points.  Lou is right, the proposal does tread in a couple of
areas - it introduces DIVs into the generated output and it assigns an
attribute in a much less general way than has been discussed on this list
recently.

The way I see it, the proposed syntax jives with the "inspiration" of
Markdown (plain text email) quite nicely.  The "source" (text file) remains
as readable as a plan text email message, while the output (html file)
contains markup used by the browser.  Of course, my sidebar example is not
found in email, but what about

(snip)
...
(end of snip)

when marking a section that should, presumably, be moved to your clipboard?

I can think of a bunch more examples where having DIVs in my web site is a
*good thing*: menus, sidebars, etc.  I guess you could kludge this by
assigning attributes to a blockquotes block, but that seems ugly.  Comments?

Admittedly, the automatic assignment of the class attribute here is a
special case of the attribute assignment discussion had earlier.  But, in
the case of DIVs, might this kind of shorthand make sense?

(recipe)
...
(end of recipe)

rather than

(start div)
...
(end div){myrecipe}
{myrecipe}: class="recipe"

On another note, the "of" could certainly be optional. :-)

Great feedback... just kicking around ideas here.

John