on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[John Fraser]

On Mar 5, 2008, at 2:38 PM, david parsons wrote:

>   When I write a really long list,

>

>    *  sometimes, after a particularly long and

>       detailed list item, I'll lose track of the

>       exact indentation and

>     * add one too many spaces to the leading

>       indent.

>

>    so it would be bad if that broke nesting.


Good point.  But Markdown's indentation rules are a mess, and I don't  
think there's any way to fix them without breaking some examples like  
this.  Hell, I don't see how we can achieve a standard unless we're  
willing to break a few edges cases in the various implementations.

Again, tools might help here: I'd love it if we could build conversion  
utilities that run, say, Markdown.pl's algorithm over some input,  
produce an abstract syntax tree, and then output that in the new  
version of Markdown.  Pie in the sky, but worth considering.