the will of the people

[bowerbird]

sherwood said:

>   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.


we don't yet know the will of the people, sherwood.

because "the people" generally do not even realize
there is a problem with markdown fractionalization.

all we have, thus far, are markdown _developers_
who continue to assert that "there isn't a problem"
-- over and above what michel terms "edge cases"
and "extensions to the core syntax" -- as if those
"extensions" weren't absolutely necessary so as to
overcome the primitive nature of "the core syntax".

but when "the people" come to learn the reality of
the inconsistencies that will break their documents,
they will squawk loudly, and we'll know their "will"...

you can hear the beginning of the rumbling already,
from the techies who are using markdown, and are
-- as a result of that normal usage -- thus becoming
aware of the problems once their users go past the
superficial nature of the 10-minute markdown intro.

ergo, outcry from stack-overflow and github people.

or lately, in the past week, this post on hacker news:

>   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613841


it's easy to get people to fall for something "simple"
when they think that simple is all they'll ever need...

but once your "simple" bites them in the butt, badly,
they'll see it was a mistake to jump in the quicksand.

as markdown continues to become more prevalent,
the dissatisfaction it generates will grow alongside.

and it was all so easy to predict.  and thus sidestep.
but nobody took straightforward action to prevent it.

-bowerbird