on the philosophical aspects of a specification

[Yuri Takhteyev]

>  >     *hello **dear* boy**

>

>  That's a very good question. Here's a counterquestion: what does

>  a human reader see in that text?


When I try to look at this with my normal-person eye, what I see here
is incorrect markup, which I then want to leave it as is and move on.
When I look at it with my formalistic left-parsing eye, I see
"<em>hello **dear</em> boy**".   When I look at it with my reg-exps in
a loop eye, I see "*hello <strong>dear* boy</strong>".  Either one of
those is ok with me.  Let's just pick one.  Everything else is from
the devil, I say.  Please, let's keep it simple.

So, the user will type in something like this and get "<em>hello
**dear</em> boy**".  Not much of a tradegy.  They will say, oh, silly
me, must have screwed something up.  (They did!)  Then they'll go and
fix it.  I am all for flexibility, but not to the point of trying to
divine the meaning of ambiguous or ill-formed markup.

I don't think it really matters what we output for cases like this.  I
think any rule would be ok, as long as it satisfies the following
criteria:

1. It's _simple_
2. It always produces valid XHTML (unless input has HTML tags)
3. It should produce appropriate HTML for "normal" markdown.

My reg-exp eye says:  "strong" before "em" (longer pattern first),
starting from the right for each.  I am pretty sure this rule
satisfies 1, 2, and 3.

Let's stop this non-sense and get back to defining a spec for the
_normal_ markdown.

  - yuri

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