Agreeing on "Historical Markdown" (was: Re: text/markdown effort in IETF (invite))

[John MacFarlane]

+++ Sean Leonard [Jul 11 14 01:54 ]:

>Since we cannot reach consensus on what ought to be "Standard 
>Markdown" today, can the community reach consensus on "Historical 
>Markdown"--of which I propose three working definitions?

I think the only sensible thing to refer to is John Gruber's Markdown
syntax description, which is the canonical reference (even if it is very
incomplete on the details).  Markdown.pl 1.0.1 and 1.0.2b7 are both
buggy implementations.  Neither one is faithful to the syntax
description.

To give just one example: the syntax description says,
"Each subsequent paragraph in a list item must be indented by either 4
spaces or one tab."  But neither version of Markdown.pl actually
imposes this requirement:

http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/?normalize=1&text=+-+item%0A%0A+more%0A%0A+-+new+item%0A