Proposal for meta-data (third revision)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2007-01-11 à 4:04, Jacob Rus a écrit :


> Andrea Censi wrote:

>> Changes were:

>>

>> *	Changed the syntax for compatibility with a future extension  

>> mechanism.

>>

>> 	The first character in the curly braces must be a colon, optionally

>> 	followed by a space:

>

> I wasn't meaning to suggest before that {«extension-name»  

> «content»} was

> necessarily the best syntax for an extension system, but merely  

> that it

> was a possibility.


I know I said it before on this list[1][2], but there's already a  
supported syntax for this kind of extensions: XML processing  
instructions.

     <?«processor-name» «content»?>

  [1]: http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2004-April/ 
000390.html
  [2]: http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2006-June/ 
000067.html


Processing instructions are passed as-is by Markdown and are pretty  
easy to catch later with a simple regex[^1], so it's already possible  
to implement this kind of extension when they're not dependent on  
Markdown. And I see no reason why some classes of processing  
instructions could not be processed by the Markdown parser directly  
when that's needed.

[^1]:
     You can search for processing instructions to parse in the Markdown
     *output* with this regular expression:

         /<\?processor-name\b\s*(.*?)\?>/

     where you replace "processor-name" with the name of your  
extension and
     where the first match contains the content for the instruction.


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