Markdown development

[Sherwood Botsford]

>

> Position      Team              P      GD      PTS

> 1                 Man Utd         31     46      67

> 2                 Arsenal          31     40       67

> 3                 Chelsea          29     42      64

> 4                 Tottenham     30     26      55

> 5                 Liverpool       31     19       52

> 6                 Man City        28     17       50

> 7                 Aston Villa     29     17       50

> 8                 Everton          30      6       45

> 9                 Birmingham   30     -3       44

> 10               Fulham           29      0       38

> 11               Stoke              30     -6       36

> 12               Sunderland    30     -6       34

> 13               Blackburn      29     -17     34

> 14               Bolton             31     -20     32

> 15               Wigan             31     -30     31

> 16               Wolves            30     -24     28

> 17               West Ham       30     -14     27

> 18               Burnley           31     -33     24

> 19               Hull                 30     -35     24

> 20               Portsmouth    30     -25     13

>

> It should be possible to do without having to use html. For more complex

> tables (eg multiple lines in spanning cells, tables within tables) you are

> getting into a different kettle of fish - I can see requiring html for that.

>




 Agreed.  This is the sort of thing that I do right now with MMD's tables.
Doing nested tables in HTML by hand is awful.  My response to nested tables
is "Please don't"  I know some layout mavins  use this to control
presentation.  I prefer <div> + CSS.  I often use this construct to add
illustration to an article <div class="picture_right_40" which contains an
image, a caption, and a ruler line.  It floats right, and is sized to 40% of
the width of the containing div.  This allows me to still have text that is
readable, without having to remember opening and closing tags beyond the
<div> and </div>

A colleague of mine used tabs for programming indents, and commented that
once the indents got the the point where there wasn't enough line left to
work, it was time to abstract.  Pull a chunk out as a subroutine or
function.

HTML generally, and in tables in particular, can have too many open tags.
In general I find that not being able to see the close on the same page as
the open makes for error prone writing.
Unfortunately there is no good way in html to do the equivalent of a
subroutine, to abstract it out. We have a plethora of CMS systems to enable
us to try to keep the content separate from the presentation, so that we
have to do the difficult stuff less often.

MD is a device for enabling the content to be less cluttered.  It's not full
separationg from presentation, but it's good enough.

Different people have different itches.  And so MD forks in a multitude of
ways.

If someone wants order they have to *want* it enough to put a fair amount of
work on it.

They would have to document the edge cases, badger each developer to fix the
bugs, and nudge toward concensus.  Possibly write dialect transform programs
to make moving stuff between one dialect and another.

One objection to configuration has been document portability.  Alas we don't
have that now because of the multiple forks.  Mind you adding configuration
could well make this problem worse, unless there is an umbrella organization
to use configurations to make forks more compatible instead of more
different.
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