Markdown Discuss - Jul 2008 - standard-izing extended markdown

Hello!

On the markdown site it is written: "Markdown?s syntax is intended for
one purpose: to be used as a format for writing for the web.", although
recently I moved from Emacs Muse to Markdown markup for writing my study
notes and plan to use it for writing technical documentation as well.

However, in order to be able to use the features I had in Muse, I write
using 'extended' syntax and use Pandoc to convert my study notes to
*.odt (and to *.doc to my mentor), while I plan to convert markdown to
ConTeXt for my own publishing needs.

Pandoc will get bibliographic citations support and it already has
support for stuff like footnotes, tables, and definition lists.

That's why I'm interested to know what is the plan in regard to
standardizing some of those 'extra' features which put markdown markup
in the category of (more) serious authoring solutions?

I appreciate the simplicity of markdown, but still consider that the
above features do not taint the basic model, but provide powerful
authoring solution along with converters like Pandoc which does
LaTeX/ConTeXt/...


Sincerely,
Gour


-- 

Gour  | Zagreb, Croatia  | GPG key: C6E7162D
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Le 2008-07-22 ? 15:18, Gour a ?crit :
> That's why I'm interested to know what is the plan in regard to
> standardizing some of those 'extra' features which put markdown
markup
> in the category of (more) serious authoring solutions?
Well, I plan to specify and define unambiguously the syntax for  
Markdown Extra, with an eye on keeping that spec usable to implement a  
plain Markdown parser too. I hope to convince some other Markdown  
implementers to follow the parsing model in that spec to help improve  
interoperability and compatibility both with standard and extra  
features.

You can read the current draft here:
<http://michelf.com/specs/markdown-extra/>

Development of that spec is somewhat stalled right now, as I'm working  
on other things. Note that these other things include an experimental  
incremental parser for PHP Markdown and PHP Markdown Extra... which  
could count as advancing the spec anyway by looking at what is  
practical and what is not. (Some problems with the current approach in  
the spec convinced me to experiment a little before writing further.)


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/