Styling Markdown approaches

[Sherwood Botsford]

I love standards.  There are so many to choose from.

Yes the core of MD is similar.  But there are enough edge cases that you
cannot count on being able to take MD from one location and using it at
another.  I would prefer to be able to control this behaviour either with a
configuration file, or inline material, rather than having to edit the
markup for each file itself.  Doing it inline, means that in theory for
each tweak there is a configuation value that follows the 'standard' (such
as it isn't) and a value for the tweak.

In the archives of this list there are records of many items discussing
where Gruber's spec was ambiguous.    And the canonical code doesn't make
html that validates, as loose tags are surrounded by <P> tags.

Fork my own? I've done that.  I have the older CPAN version of MMD and have
hacked the default value of the markdown flag so that it is 1 all the
time.  It's a crummy hack.   I have to redo it every time I update my CPAN
library for a new version of Perl.


I write web pages.  I went to MD because it minimized the amount of
repetitive markup I was doing.

Will it bite me?  Quite possibly.  But my MD files are not public access.

It's actually worse than that, because for me MMD is actually a module in
Template Toolkit.  So my information is MD markup wrapped in a preface and
epilog of template toolkit.  Included file in the TT portion create my
static menu. Portable? No.  But the result is a static page, without
javascript (except for google analytics) that loads blindingly fast, and
allows me to use a shared server without worrying about CPU contention.

But it would be a 3 hour hack to write a script to strip the TT wrapper
off, another hack to explicityly put in the markdown=1 flags.  But
meanwhile I have cleaner looking markup.

However, I won't try to convert anyone.  Several people have spoken
eloquently that this is a Bad Thing (tm) and no one has agreed.  I must
abide by the Will of the People, and withdraw to the Cave of the
Curmudgeons.

Respectfully,

Sherwood of Sherwood's Forests

Sherwood Botsford
Sherwood's Forests --  http://Sherwoods-Forests.com
780-848-2548
50042 Range Rd 31
Warburg, Alberta T0C 2T0



On 19 April 2013 20:22, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca> wrote:


> Le 19-avr.-2013 à 17:00, Sherwood Botsford <sgbotsford at gmail.com> a écrit

> :

>

> > That particular cat is out of the bag, however, and we have a score of

> > implementations.  From all apparent discussion here, there is no

> particular

> > urge for the writers to get together to reduce the implementations.  So

> we

> > have 20 document formats already.  And not all the implementers are

> > concerned with backward compatibility.

> >

> > The same can be said of html and CSS.  CSS configures how the html is

> > rendered.  So CMD could configure the way MD is rendered.

>

> CSS doesn't change how the HTML is parsed, only how it looks (and sometime

> how it behaves). Similarly, configuration options in a Markdown parser that

> let you adjust *the output* to your linking are very welcome.

>

> As for all the implementations, they mostly vary in edge cases and in

> their extensions to the core syntax. The core Markdown syntax (as defined

> by John Gruber) is pretty much the same everywhere, and this includes how

> HTML blocks are parsed. Implementations doing things differently than core

> Markdown are doing it mostly by adding restrictions out of security

> concerns with user-generated content.

>

> By the way, if you really feel like it you should go ahead and hack your

> preferred implementation to do what you want. Just keep in mind that your

> documents using this tweaked syntax feature won't work right with other

> implementations. This might or might not come to bite you in the future

> depending on what you intend to do with those documents.

>

>

> --

> Michel Fortin

> michel.fortin at michelf.ca

> http://michelf.ca/

>

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> Markdown-Discuss mailing list

> Markdown-Discuss at six.pairlist.net

> http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss

>

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