Trouble with parentheses in Markdown hyperlinks

[John MacFarlane]

> Don't reinvent the wheel:

>

>       http://babelmark.bobtfish.net/


Babelmark has very outdated versions of many implementations (e.g.
pandoc 0.46, current version is 1.9.4.2.) And I don't blame the
maintainer for not keeping up to date. It's a big job to keep up-to-date
versions of umpteen implementations in many different languages going --
especially while keeping an eye on security.

A while back on this list, I made the following suggestion.  Let's
devise a protocol for a "dingus server" that each implementer can
implement and keep up to date.  Each dingus server would receive text
input as a POST request, or perhaps text plus some options, and return
HTML output. (There could be a relatively short length limit if people
are worried about users relying on the dingus server for regular text
conversion.)

The central multidingus could then just be an HTML page with AJAX.
It would take user input, then send out AJAX requests to all the dingus
servers, consolidate the output, and display it.

When I, as a markdown implementer, update one of my implementations,
I would just need to make sure I update the corresponding dingus server.
That would be my responsibility, and the person who maintains the central
multidingus needn't worry about it.  All the central multidingus needs are
the URLs of all the dingus servers.

I think a multidingus like this would be *really* useful. What do people
think?

John