Maruku: a better Markdown interpreter for Ruby.

[Jan Erik Moström]

Reply to Andrea Censi <andrea at censi.org> 06-12-30 12:24:


>Again, I understand you concern that all Markdown implementations

>should give the same results. But at the moment, and I think that is

>not only my opinion, the Markdown specification has a lot of holes. So

>even if wanted, I could not make Maruku "Markdown 1.0 compatible".


I don't think it's a matter of copying the bugs it's a matter 
what the actual commands are. I already see a number of 
variations of Markdown (supersets) and I personally think this 
is "dangerous" ... if it's Markdown encoded text it should be 
rendered correctly (bugs are as I say a different thing) by all 
Markdown implementations.


>I promise one thing: if Markdown2 will be released with a decent set

>of features (tables, footnotes, definition lists, metadata) and a

>clear documentation (if it's not a formal grammar, at least an

>unambiguous specification), then Maruku will be Markdown2-canonical as

>its primary mode of operation.


I think there is one very important thing here to consider, 
readability of the source. One of the reasons I like Markdown is 
that it's (in my opinion) more readable than what for example 
reStructuredText <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html> use. 
I want to be able to take the "source" and paste it in an email 
message and it should be perfectly readable to my dad when he 
gets it ... and the same text should be able to produce a HTML 
page (and LaTeX if I could wish).

If the penalty for this is that I have to forget about certain 
markup abilities then OK ... I can live with that. I would of 
course like to have both readable source and a "full fledged" 
markup language but the first is much more important for me ... 
otherwise I would have used reStructuredText.

                     jem