text/markdown effort in IETF (invite)

[Michel Fortin]

Le 9-juil.-2014 à 11:49, Sean Leonard <dev+ietf at seantek.com> a écrit :

> Hi markdown-discuss Folks:
> 
> I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type for all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>.
> 
> The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In particular we need to better understand and document what versions of Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal syntaxes will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations have an easy way to be distinguished from one another. (See the "flavor" parameter discussed in the draft.)

The "flavor" parameter is a good idea in theory. I'm not sure it'll be very useful in general though. Nobody is going to annotate their file with the right flavor unless there's a tangible benefit, and I don't see what the benefit could be. Software that could do something useful with markdown-identified content will likely ignore the flavor part when parsing because no one wants to see "incompatible flavor" errors, especially when commonly used parts of the syntax are compatible anyway.

Markdown is in the spot where HTML was before HTML5 with each implementation doing its own thing. I don't know if Markdown will get out of there anytime soon. I'll point out however that HTML never got anything like a "flavor" parameter in its MIME type, and even if it did it'd not have helped clear the mess in any way.

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