Incremental parser

[Jacob Rus]

Michel Fortin wrote:

> I don't think syntax highlighting is an argument that should help decide 

> what Markdown should do.


It's not, really.  But you claimed that it's worse for “readers and 
writers” and I was explaining why it's better for me, as a reader and 
writer.


> To solve your problem, I suggest you have two colors: one for the so- 

> called "valid" emphasis, the one Markdown will effectively convert to 

> emphasis, another for "invalid" emphasis, for when the closing asterisk 

> is missing. That should make authoring errors even more obvious.


The problem with this is that highlights your document incorrectly as 
you type it, only being correct once you've finished typing.  I find 
such highlighting very distracting.


> Basically, I think what you're calling "invalid Markdown" is really what 

> is left undefined by the current documentation.


Yes, that's right. IOW stuff that's intended to be markdown syntax, but 
doesn't actually fit the spec, and so currently gets messed up in output.


> ...To me, it sounds like an excuse to output 

> garbage for poorly-edited documents, which is not something I want to do 

> with my parser.


No.  The garbage output is the state of current markdown 
implementations.  My goal is to avoid it.

-Jacob