evolving the spec (was: forking Markdown.pl?)

[Thomas Nichols]

Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote on 2008/02/29 17:14:

> On Fri, Feb 29, 2008 at 8:52 AM, Thomas Nichols <nichols7 at googlemail.com> wrote:

>   

>>  Having a spec/ruleset/syntax definition seems an admirable goal; does

>>  this necessarily imply that, for example, you should not be able to

>>  begin a list item with zero to three spaces, at your discretion? This

>>  seems rather at odds with the overall theme of your mail, with which I

>>  heartily agree.

>>     

>

> As a slightly-OT aside, there's another view on this "spaces before a

> list item" issue that sees it as a bug.

>

> When I write a list of references in a academic paper, I do so with

> list items.  I do a hanging indent where the rest of the reference is

> indented by two or three spaces, like so:

>

> * Aslam, J. A., Popa, R. A., & Rivest, R. L. (2007). On estimating the

>   size and confidence of a statistical audit, USENIX/ACCURATE

>   Electronic Voting Technology Workshop 2007. Retrieved February 24,

>   2008. from

>   <http://www.usenix.org/events/evt07/tech/full_papers/aslam/aslam.pdf>.

>

> Markdown sees that "  2008." as a list item.

>

>   


Perhaps a first step to resolving the much broader question of whether 
to define a formal grammar, a ruleset, a textual description or whatever 
could be just to reach consensus on some of these questions? As Yuri 
mentioned, "code block syntax" is still an open loop, as is "indentation 
before list item marker" and many others. In the interests of starting 
to close some of these  loops, I'll kick this one to a separate thread - 
and if we can reach consensus, it can be documented and referenced in 
any spec/docs/implementations anyone cares to create.

Once we have a set of these "consensus opinions" hammered out, it makes 
some sense to me that we then start talking about a spec, a set of rules 
and so on - IETF-style, but perhaps with rather shorter RFCs...

-- Thomas.