Optional features (was: Markdown Extra Specification (First Draft))

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.com> [2008-05-23 04:35]:

> I'm not sure those "features" should be formally part of the

> spec. I believe however that if the spec is well written it

> should be pretty trivial to see what must be changed to achieve

> them.


Yeah, I don’t think they belong in the spec itself either.

I also agree with your opposition to them; if anything, one
should filter the *output* of a Markdown-to-HTML conversion
so that it won’t matter whether people write literal `<em>`
tags or use asterisks. In both cases the resulting HTML is
benign, so why disallow those tags? OTOH disallowing literal
tags in the input means you cannot write a `<blockquote>`
with a `cite` attribute, since Markdown provides no syntax
for that. Scrubbing the input indiscriminately therefore
removes functionality for no benefit at all.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>