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

[Yuri T.]

> Well, we could argue that what is really necessary is a way to link

> to headers, not to set manually the id attribute of each one. But

> there is many reasons to not want automatic id generation: What

> happen to internal links if you change slightly the name of one

> header? Will adding a new section in the middle of the document break

> outside links to other headers? These two problems cannot appear if

> you set your own id and do not change them.



I think a good solution here would be to have automatic id generation that 
could be overriden with an implicit {#...} code. So, for instance, 

### My Header

would produce

<h3 id="myheader">My Header</h3>

while 

### My New Header {#whatever_it_was_before}

would procude

<h3 id="whatever_it_was_before">My New Header</h3>

This way the most of the documents can avoid the {#...} syntax, but it would 
still be there for you if you want.

As for class attributes, I've been wondering if it might make sense to allow 
people to style differently lists, etc. that are marked with different 
symbols Let's suppose that *text* produced <em class="md_star">text</em> 
while _text_ produced <em class="md_underscore">text</em>. This would give 
the user a simple and clean way of marking up two different kinds of 
emphasys. (E.g., I could *text* for original emphasis in quotations and 
_text_ for _my_ emphasis, which would allow me to style them differently 
later.) The same applies to lists: if you have two kinds of lists, you can 
mark some with asterisks and others with hyphens. Note that none of this 
hurts the user who wants to treat *...* and _..._ as the same, since that's 
what they would get by default.

- yuri
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