Metadata syntax (was Universal syntax for Markdown)

[Tao Klerks]

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 1:30 AM, David Sanson <dsanson at gmail.com> wrote:


>

> On Sep 19, 2011, at 4:02 PM, Rob McBroom <mailinglist0 at skurfer.com> wrote:

>

> > Those sound like reasons for the metadata to *identify* the abstract, but

> I see no requirement that it must be literally *stored* there. If the

> metadata contained something like

> >

> >    abstract: relative/path/to/abstract.mdown

> >

> > That would allow for all of the above scenarios while keeping the

> metadata syntax/section simple.

>

> But that makes the document far less portable, and I'm liable to lose the

> extra file at some point. I'd much rather have it be self-contained---not,

> of course, if that means that the document suddenly becomes weirdly ugly and

> complicated, but I don't see anyone proposing a solution that makes

> documents weird and ugly and complicated.

>

>

Given that the abstract is actually part of the content (it is generally
printed as part of the document, right?) it would seem more sensible to have
the meta-data refer to a section name/path within the document. We can
probably assume any markdown parser is capable of identifying the content
between a heading and its next same-or-higher-depth sibling. "Abstract"
could be a default value, supporting the "simplest case first"
example Fletcher T. Penney provided above;

This way content is in the right place (in the document, and appearing where
you would expect it to with a simple abstract-unaware markdown converter),
english speakers just write their document, and others can provide the
"abstract" header, without needing to know anything about parsing or
serialization rules.

I realize I'm following up on the least-important aspect of this
conversation, but I do wonder: what are genuine use cases where meta-data
really does contain structured/formattable content that should not be
considered part of the document content? It doesn't look like the abstract
is really a valid case.
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