Islands of talk (was [ANN] vfmd)

[Fletcher T. Penney]

On Sep 27, 2013, at 10:16 AM, Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca> wrote:


> I guess if an announcement was posted here whenever an implementation makes a significant syntax change (like a new feature) it'd help fight against fragmentation, even if no one is actively working on a spec. It does not even have to be an official announcement, just a "Hey, HisGreatMarkdownParser added this feature last week" message from someone who noticed would do the trick. Or is there a *Markdown News* site I don't know about tracking this kind of things already?


If there is, I also don't know about it.

My personal philosophy is that I don't want to get too inundated with the details of every little Markdown parser out there.  I think it must be a rite of puberty to create a Markdown parser in the favorite language du jour??  I think the constant reinventing of the wheel is detrimental to the overall cohesiveness of Markdown, but who am I to tell someone they can't write their own project if they want to? I just don't want to read about each one until it reaches some level of critical mass.

I rely on hearing about these new changes/features through "filtered channels."  If there's a feature that's really good, someone will eventually email me to request it.  Or I'll see it mentioned on this list and look into it.  I'm ok with it taking a bit longer to reach me, if it means less noise to wade through.  By waiting a little longer to adopt these changes, I feel that the features I have added to MultiMarkdown over the last year have been of high quality, rather than "junk" features that no one will ever use. 


> I don't know about you, for me I think it'd help take better decisions. Right now I'm relying on Babelmark 2 to know what others are doing, but that's only good for checking specific things. I miss the big picture. I feel like no one really grasp the big picture because all the information is scattered all around.


I agree with you on this.


> Perhaps I'm just startled I didn't notice before about everyone who implemented Github-style fenced code blocks. But I do wonder what I should have been doing to notice that earlier. Despite having read every messages on this list since its creation, I suddenly feel completely out of touch with Markdown. That's the problem I'd like to have a solution for.


I think that's because there is no "THE Markdown" any more.  The original perl script was fantastic in it's day.  Now it's slow and buggy (even if you feel, as Gruber seems to, that it's feature complete).

MultiMarkdown has its own discussion list that is relatively low volume, but much of it would not be interesting to people who don't use MultiMarkdown.  So, I don't think combining lists would be a good solution (not that you were suggesting it).


Perhaps a "Markdown Wiki" would be a useful way to centralize information, but still allow multiple contributors??


> P.S.: Why is MultiMarkdown not on Babelmark 2?


Because no one has put it there...   I don't have time (or the desire) to maintain a "dingus" server just for this, and apparently no one else has wanted to do it either.


F-



-- 
Fletcher T. Penney
fletcher at fletcherpenney.net 

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