markdown conversions

[Richard Caldwell]

> From: Bowerbird at aol.com



> i myself, with z.m.l., simply require that each header be

> unique to begin with, thus avoiding that potential glitch.

> and i assign an i.d. to each paragraph, because... why not?



> that's how you give the user more power _without_ adding

> more complexity. (or gumming up the file with any crap.)



This seems like a bad idea to me. 

I think it's assumed in the mission of Markdown that the content comes first and it should never be dictated or impacted by the markup.  Requiring unique headers is much more intrusive than somewhat ugly markup.

I do agree that the Markdown Extra implementation isn't ideal.   The id hints shouldn't be necessary where a unique id can be generated automatically.  MultiMarkdown gets this right in my view.  Ids are generated automatically.  The markup to specify an id is only necessary for disambiguation.   Also, the markup used for ids in MMD is a lot less ugly.  For example:

### Overview [MultiMarkdownOverview] ##

I think Markdown extra makes a common mistake among extensions - it sacrifices readability of the plain text to ensure a unique element and simplify parsing. 

Regards,
Richard