on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[Steve Hoelzer]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 10:08 PM, Michel Fortin
<michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote:

> Le 2008-03-04 à 13:15, david parsons a écrit :

>

>

>  >   But what's the intent of ***hello*, sailor**   ?

>  >

>  >   Should it produce

>  >    1. <strong><em>hello</em>, sailor</strong>

>  >    2. <strong>*hello*, sailor</strong>

>  >    3. *<strong>hello*, sailor</strong>

>  >    4. ***hello<em>, sailor<strong>

>  >    5. ***hello*, sailor**

>  >    6. <em><strong>hello</strong></em><strong>, sailor</strong>

>  >    7. <em><strong>hello</em>, sailor</strong> (which makes baby XML

>  > cry) ?

>

>  I'd say 1:


<snip>


>

>  A better question is what to do with this:

>

>      *hello **dear* boy**


For cases like these, I'd say that Markdown shouldn't do anything.

>From the official Markdown page:



> The overriding design goal for Markdown's formatting syntax is to make

> it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted

> document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking

> like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While

> Markdown's syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML

> filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown's syntax

> is the format of plain text email.


So, the question is: Would you ever see **mismatched *asterisks***
intentionally written in plain text email?

I don't think so, because it doesn't make intuitive sense. And if I
can't make sense of the plain text, why should Markdown define one
interpretation as being correct?

Steve