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

[Michel Fortin]

Le 05-09-05 à 14:51, Fletcher T. Penney a écrit :


> You misunderstood - the markup text for version 1 is:

>

>     ### Inline HTML ###

>

> The markup text for version 2 is:

>

>     ### Inline HTML ###               {#inlinehtml}

>

> The output for both would be:

>

>     <h3 id="inlinehtml">Inline HTML</h3>

>

> Clearly, the first version has less markup (i.e. none).  Both could  

> be referenced by linking to "#inlinehtml".


Sorry. In this case I can't argue: version 1 has less markup and  
surely is ideal when reading markdown text directly.


> I agree that headers are important.  I just think they can be done  

> automatically, without adding any markup to the raw text  (re-read  

> my original post).


That would be ideal. However, I believe this will often produce sub- 
optimal ids. As an example, in the syntax document on your wiki I can  
find this id "automaticescapingforspecialcharacters" which is much  
too long. Just as an ideal weblog software allow you to choose your  
own "slug" for an entry (because clean URL matters), you should be  
allowed to write your own ids too.

And I would add that a small change in the text of one header will  
break every link to that header in the document or in other documents.

I'm also particularly interested to see what an automatically given  
id would be like given Japanese text in the header, or accented  
letters as found in many languages.

Finally, as John previously mentioned, id collisions can happen.  
Isn't that enough reasons to not generate an id attribute automatically?


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/