Markdown development

Lou Quillio public at quillio.com
Tue Mar 23 01:12:54 EDT 2010



>> Markdown's dead? Absurd.

>

> Obviously. That’s why no one said that.

>

> Markdown *development* is dead.

>

> (Straw men are easy to clobber.)


And cherries are easy to pick. My point is that the canonical
ambitions that some have for Markdown aren't shared by it's author
(Gruber) and it's adoptive parent (Michel Fortin). I'd argue that
this is an acceptable state of affairs, especially considering the
wild success of the general format and the appearance of gentlemen
like Thomas Leitner and his kramdown project. To me, this is a line
of maintainers, each picking up the tacit core, which is 96% finished
by now. And, again, it's always been part of the bargain that you
must wrap the transformer if you need special shit, or if you
regularly work with an unresolved edge case.

I think that elevating Markdown to a grammar and taking an obligation
to produce and maintain coordinated transformers in multiple languages
is a nice ambition for somebody to have. I doubt very much that it
would deliver benefits over the status quo that would justify the
effort. I could be wrong.

LQ


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