Punchline: variants and processor (text/markdown)

[Dennis E. Hamilton]

Concerning the problem of MIME type being known to storage systems and conveyed in HTTP responses, but not in anything like attached metadata, I believe the generic solution is known as #!.  The nice thing about having processor and variants separate from the generic name, as in #!md [more-stuff]... is that it solves a problem that has always been an issue where the first term is used as an application-program association too.  In this case, whatever processor is picked up at that stage can either process the [more-stuff]... or not.

This sort of thing can get weighty, so one might expect an md processor to treat immediately-following #! lines as continuations of the first one.


 -- Dennis E. Hamilton
    dennis.hamilton at acm.org    +1-206-779-9430
    https://keybase.io/orcmid  PGP F96E 89FF D456 628A
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(Yes, I have been thinking about this a great deal, although I was thinking in terms of wikiTexts, of which md is a flavor.  If you federate wikis and transclude content, this sort of thing becomes important.)



-----Original Message-----
From: Markdown-Discuss [mailto:markdown-discuss-bounces at six.pairlist.net] On Behalf Of Sean Leonard
Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2014 06:26
To: markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net
Subject: Re: Punchline: variants and processor (text/markdown)

On 7/15/2014 5:59 AM, Michel Fortin wrote:
[ ... ]
> But how does a document get annotated with the attributes in the first place? Who chooses the processor and variant attributes of a document and based on what? And where is it stored? Do you have any specific example of how that could work in any given setup?

I am working on all of that.

The author chooses the processor and variant attributes; or, the 
author's editing software will do this for the author. For example, a 
tool like MarkdownPad can save out this metadata in the "right place". I 
put it in quotes because I know that is an issue. One thing obvious 
(from the metadata sub-thread) is that it cannot be stored in a generic 
Markdown file in a broadly compatible way--I am thinking of something 
adjacent.

If it is in a version control system like Subversion, or a CMS, then it 
could be stored in the properties/attributes. If it is in an e-mail (in 
particular, an e-mail generated by a CMS, see below), then it can be 
stored in the usual MIME way.

I am trying not to invent another metadata format, so I am still looking 
at the existing options out there.

[ ... ]