toast, history, sayonara

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

ok, while i was in the process of writing that last post,
fletcher and john weighed in themselves.   that's good.

i can say some things that they can't, though, so i will.

fletcher told you how multimarkdown is booming, and
it was an impressive list.   what you might not realize is,
he _undersold_ it.   it is even bigger than he described,
and it's gonna _double_ in size in the next six months.

all you other variants are toast.

even if you all could manage to form a consensus
(yeah, right, like that's gonna happen) where you
eliminated your own inconsistencies, you couldn't
overcome the lead multimarkdown will soon have.

but if you wanna _try_, i would suggest that you use
textmate as your workhorse.   with the coming alpha
of v2.0, which odgaard has promised "by christmas",
this "much-anticipated" release of a high-profile app
is the _only_ thing that would have a fighting chance
against the juggernaut multimarkdown will soon be.
because if you don't have a text-editor that can do
an on-the-fly display of output, you'll go nowhere.
that's the standard; that's why you'd need textmate.

but that assumes (1) that you could do it, which is
highly laughable, and (2) that odgaard would even
want to take such a confrontational stance with his
new version.   it has been such a long time coming
that he probably feels more than enough pressure
from the existing demand, without adding _more_.
he'd be a lot smarter to try to exist peacefully with
multimarkdown by adopting the pandoc parser too.
even though "composer" will be a competitive rival,
textmate can count on its own existing user-base.

but you script-based reg-ex markdown converters?
you are history.   your time passed.   it's that simple.

oh sure, your existing users will continue to use you.
but you won't get any new users.   you have no future.

sayonara.

-bowerbird

p.s.   fletcher, both pandoc and peg-leg come from
john macfarlane, so i might mix up their labels, but
i hardly think it matters much; same with lunamark.
and i'm gonna umbrella everything you do under the
name of "multimarkdown", and just let other people
ask you the nature of your "latest greatest iteration".
my purpose was to list the developments themselves,
but i thank you for correcting the credit attributions.

p.p.s.   i probably should mention at some time that
i can't say if my text-analysis methodology is "better"
than john's parser, but i do know it's easier to grok.
most especially if you ain't a computer-science grad.
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