Block quotes with a blank line between them get merged

[John Gruber]

Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote on 10/18/06 at 
9:43 AM:


>  Of course, it can be debated if this is desirable or not, but 

>both PHP  Markdown and Perl Markdown are coherent with the 

>syntax description. My  personal take is that it would be 

>better to require a `>` on the blank line  between the two 

>paragraphs, but changing that would probably break some  

>people's text.


Yeah, it's not a bug, but it probably should be considered a
mistake in the syntax.

I don't take breaking existing Markdown-formatted text lightly,
but I don't want to be too cautious about improving the syntax
going forward just to avoid breaking existing text.

We should change this.

Code blocks are another issue, though, because they don't have
explicit line markers.

The only way I can think of to support multiple consecutive code
blocks (while still allowing a single code block to contain two,
three, or more consecutive blank lines) would be to introduce an
additional (optional) marker for code blocks. Way back when in
2003 while I was working on the original Markdown syntax, code
blocks were delimited by colons:


: sub foo {

:    print "foo";

: }


Same as:

     sub foo {
         print "foo";
     }

This would also help clarify things when you want to put a code
block inside an already-indented paragraph-mode list item.

To be clear, this would be *in addition to* the current "just
indent it" rule for code blocks. It would be a second, more
explicit, way to specify them.

-J.G.