Islands of talk (was [ANN] vfmd)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 27-sept.-2013 à 2:54, Roopesh Chander <roop at forwardbias.in> a écrit :


> I think it's a good idea to track problems found using GitHub issues

> instead of mails - it's easier that way to (1) stay focused on the issue

> and (2) locate the discussion in the future.


You're probably right. Those two points are true.

I'm going to make a more general comment though. This list is followed by many Markdown implementers and users. It is a good place to discuss the Markdown syntax and have people raise a flag whenever something conflicting pops up or to have many eyes review an issue.

But I can't keep but wonder if every implementation having its own separate issue tracker with separate discussions is healthy for Markdown. Of course, all implementations cannot share all the same issue tracker, but it seems to me that this is moving the talk about the syntax to multiple islands scattered all around the Internet. At least that's my experience with PHP Markdown having its own issue tracker. I fear that this reducing awareness among implementers of what is happening with other implementations, and this might be contributing to fragmentation.

On the flip side, having too many people discuss pointless details of the syntax makes it easy for the discussion here to fall into irrelevance. Perhaps that's why syntax discussions here are rare now.

I'm not exactly sure what to ask for though. Should everyone subscribe to everyone else's issue tracker to stay aware of what's happening? That's probably too much noise and not very practical.

Or perhaps the lack of talk here reflects a lack of anything happening. I don't believe this. It seems that half the implementations added support for Github-style fenced code blocks without me noticing. Isn't that newsworthy? It should be for any Markdown implementer.

Am I the only one who feels uninformed about what's happening with Markdown (outside of my own implementation)? And if so, what could be done to improve this?


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca