Extending markdown?

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> [2005-07-23 15:15]:

> So, who think this could be useful?


Sometimes, having redundant constructs for specific purpose is
useful; humans are linguistic animals, not mathematical ones.
But this is not one of those cases.

I post on a web forum which used to have special syntax for
images-as-links (because the BBCode parser was too shoddy to
correctly parse a normal image tag inside a normal link tag), and
I used the feature quite a bit. But I had to look up the order of
arguments *every* *single* *time*. And I have an excellent memory
for details like this.

Conversely, ever since the BBCode parser for that forum was
improved so that it can actually figure out what the nested
syntax means, I have been using that, and I didn’t have to look
into the documentation even a *single* *time*.

The problem with every scheme where an image URL and link URL are
given in a single construct is that people will never remember
which way around they go.

Consider, if you need more evidence, that every time I start
working with a new wiki engine, I have to spend a significant
amount of time committing the order in which its wiki markup
expects the text and target of a link to memory.

In contrast, <a href=""></a> is good syntax: by naming the
attribute, it provides a systemic hint about which piece of data
goes where. Markdown’s syntax, which is more verbose than common
wiki markup, also avoids this trap very well.

Instead, I would argue that if it’s so hard for users to figure
out on their own that they can nest image tags in the link text
in Markdown, then it should be called out explicitly in the
documentation, so they don’t need to discover/deduce it
themselves.

Users will need to read (some of) the documentation in either
case: either to learn about the extra syntax for image links, or
to find out that nesting tags allows them to make image links. So
you cannot avoid that part. But by telling them to use nested,
ordinary tags, you provide them with a systemic hint about the
order of URLs that makes it easy to deduce what it is, even when
the user forgets. If you put special syntax for image links into
the markup, you lose this advantage, and users will have to look
up the syntax again and again whenever they try to use it.

Usability-wise, it is my opinion that it’d be a loss to add
special syntax for image links.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>