Markdown development

[John MacFarlane]

+++ david parsons [Mar 05 10 22:10 ]:

> In article <20100305211753.GA27237 at protagoras.phil.berkeley.edu>,

> John MacFarlane  <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

> >Currently big players like reddit and github

> >use forms of markdown that depart significantly from John Gruber's

> >official specification;

> 

>      Okay, I'm curious.   Since I'm the writer of the "forms of markdown"

>      that reddit and github use, just exactly where does discount depart

>      significantly from JG's official specification?


Oh, I didn't know that either of those sites used discount.
Discount is, in my experience, extremely accurate (and extremely
fast). But github uses a documented variant for some purposes
(http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/), and, as for
reddit, I'm just going on my experience having posts there formatted
incorrectly. I think one context where that happened was an inline
code span with backslashes. According to John Gruber's specification, as
I understand it,

`a\`

should render as

<code>a\</code>

but discount (at least the version on babelmark) renders it as

<code>a\`</code>

Similarly,

`` a```a ``

should render as

<code>a```a</code>

but discount renders it as

<code>a</code><code>a</code><code></code>

(Hm, just noticed that peg-markdown and lunamark get that one wrong,
too. I'll have to fix that. At least pandoc gets it right.)

John