What does Markdown do with HTML comments? Recommendation on Markdown file extension?

[Arno Hautala]

On Mon, May 9, 2011 at 11:34, bucephalus org <bucephalus.org at gmail.com> wrote:

>

> Of course, the double rule

> for say *this* and _this_ is simple and is not that hard to understand. But

> I had neither a history or habit with either *this* or _that_. So, I spend

> some time on the question, what the best choice would be and which one I

> should make my own default. You may say, "whatever you prefer". But this is

> what I exactly don't expect from a standard: to be left with this choices.


This is the key. Markdown *isn't* a standard. As defined by Gruber it
is "two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software
tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to
HTML." The second applies specifically to Gruber's implementation. The
first covers the Markdown community as a whole. Overall, the Markdown
syntax is a standard only in the sense that it has a large number of
implementations that share the same core syntax, while expanding as
desired.


> When people read my markdown and when I read other peoples texts, I rather

> want us to use the same conventions.


In that case, you should communicate with those people and agree to
use the same restricted set. Markdown offering multiple forms of
emphasis markup isn't any different than SHOUTING vice using an
exclamation mark!


> And more important for me was the other "freedom" I mentioned: that there is

> no standard file extension.


If you want a standard file extension, use what Gruber does: ".text".
In my view, there isn't any such thing as a "Markdown document". If
there was, the Markdown syntax would have failed to achieve its goals.
There are *text* documents which are formatted according to Markdown
conventions, but they're still *text*. This isn't quite the same as
HTML, which are text documents that are only meant to be interpreted
as HTML. Markdown is always text, meant to be read as text, with
formatting to convey additional, but non-critical, information.

-- 
arno  s  hautala    /-|   arno at alum.wpi.edu

pgp b2c9d448