A reminder of the original design goal of Markdown - my personal thoughts

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Fletcher T. Penney <fletcher at alumni.duke.edu> [2005-09-03 21:50]:

> When one's needs start getting  too complicated, requiring the

> addition of more and more ways of  "sneaking" markup in, that's

> when you go back to XHTML. That's what  XHTML was designed for.


Except you can’t go back to HTML for just the bits you need,
because once you have a block-level element in there, Markdown
takes its ball and goes home. There’s good reason for that, but
it means you have to either restrict yourself to exactly as much
as Markdown provides and *not a whiff* more, or write HTML, lock,
stock and barrel.


> I would like to see Markdown remain true to it's original intent.  A  

> plain text syntax for structured documents that reads **AS IS**.   

> It's this simplicity that makes Markdown so attractive to me.


The fact that Markdown has a escaping backslash kind of shatters
your argument. And I often find myself in need of it to get
Markdown to interpret emotes correctly. \*sigh\*

Besides, that is kind of a fallacious argument, because if you
need something that Markdown syntax cannot express, say you want
to

           Center An Important Point For Emphasis

then you need to write HTML. HTML doesn’t look much like
plaintext, does it?

Fact is, Markdown is not plaintext. It is a simplified XHTML
authoring syntax, any way you turn it. It tries to look as much
like plaintext as possible, *for the common uses*; and the point
is to try and hit the 80/20 spot. Currently, Markdown is more at
65/5, and that is pretty good, but it can do better.

I use Markdown all the time when I write comments on weblogs; the
HTML I need there is so minimal that Markdown is always
sufficient. But I use more “advanced” HTML features (it’s kind of
laughable to call them that) so frequently in my own weblog’s
entries that Markdown is almost useless.

Having attribute syntax would make every HTML construct involving
supported tags expressible directly in Markdown, without having
to abdicate all of the Markdown simplicity as soon as you need
the vaguest bit of uncatered-for output. You can always go in
afterwards and add more plain-looking syntax for those constructs
which will really benefit from being native citizens.

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