Maruku: a better Markdown interpreter for Ruby.

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Jan Erik Moström <lists at mostrom.pp.se> [2006-12-30 16:40]:

> Reply to A. Pagaltzis <pagaltzis at gmx.de> 06-12-30 16:30:

> >The problem is that there is effectively no spec. There is a

> >format documentation, but there are many cases it does not

> >specify precisely (or at all). In that case, only the

> >behaviour of Markdown.pl can be of guidance; but it is not

> >clear which behaviours are correct, which are incidental, and

> >which are bugs; precisely because no thorough spec exists.

> 

> I agree about the lack of a formal definition (this was

> basically the reason I asked yesterday about formatters doing

> "real parsing") but in my opinion this is not the main problem,

> the main problem is that there are different supersets of

> markdown.


That doesn’t seem problematic to me. If you write documents that
use features that are not part of Markdown, and the formatter
documentation makes it clear that the features you are using are
not part of Markdown, then you know what you are getting yourself
into. I don’t see what’s bad about that.

But as matters stand, you can write documents that conform to the
format documentation and use no other features, and yet find that
their interpretation varies among the different implementations
of Markdown. This means your documents might be unwittingly tied
to the specific implementation of Markdown you are using, even
when they do not use any non-Markdown features. That seems
actually problematic to me.

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