on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[Michel Fortin]

Le 2008-03-04 à 21:47, Seumas Mac Uilleachan a écrit :


> david parsons wrote:

>

>>   And how about _________cut here_________ ?

>>

> This is a problem. Anything more than 4 _ per side does not render  

> but with 4 it does (in PHP) if you have ____cut here____ are you  

> expecting it to be converted to <em><strong><em>cut here</em></ 

> strong></em> ?


Well, that's already much better than what you get from  
Markdown.pl. :-) But I agree it could still benefit from some  
improvement.


> [...]

>

> And speaking of ambiguous

>

> * List

> * List

> * List

>  * List

> *  List

> *   List

> *  List

>  * List


Yeah, the list implementation in Markdown.pl and PHP Markdown doesn't  
follow the at all the little of a spec we have now. I've been thinking  
about rewriting the list parser in PHP Markdown, but I'm wondering  
what to do to not suddenly change a myriad of documents which may  
depends on some part of this behaviour, such as:

     * item
       * subitem
       * subitem
     * item
       * subitem

(Here, no item is indented by four space, should this be a flat list?)

I know people have written lists like the above in their document.  
They did it because it produce what they expect in their Markdown  
implementation, because the thing is readable and make sense, and  
because didn't bother to read the spec.


> What was the intent here? I would suggest more like

>

>   * List

>   * List

>   * List

>         o List

>   * List

>   * List

>   * List          o List

>

> Since only the 4th and 8th are indented 4 spaces.


Eh, I don't see a four space indent anywhere in your example. But,  
assuming your output got screwed up while editing and that the last  
list element belongs on a separate line, I agree with you that it's  
probably the best possible output to represent the author's intent.


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