Markdown Discuss - Oct 2011 - akaya.me -- also known as yet another markdown editor

emmanuel said:
>    Thanks again for the detailed comments.
well, sir, you deserve them.

and i must say that your responses are uniformly impressive,
both individually and -- most especially -- in their aggregate.

the only one of them that would still wrinkle my forehead is
the thought of possibly limiting the program only to chrome.
i believe that might be a decisive turn-off to too many users.
not that it would be such a big limitation in reality, because
it wouldn't be any different than running any dedicated app,
but only because it would _seem_ to people like "a hardship".
they "expect" that a web-app will run in _any_ web-browser.
so what you'd be making would seem more like "a plug-in"...

other than that one point, though, your responses show that
you've done lotsa thought, and that you have a good attitude.
that's a winning combination that's gonna take you very far...

so at this time, instead of discussing any of the points more,
i would just encourage you strongly to keep moving forward.

when you've hit your next plateau, and you'd like to show it,
and get feedback, come and let us know, and i'll look again.
and maybe someone else will chime in as well...   who knows?

***

but, ok, gee, can't resist commenting on one point you made,
albeit in a more generalized way, not specifically just to you...

you said you'd rather not code "yet another" markdown parser.
i can sympathize with that.   so then you said you need to find
an existing parser in javascript, not in some other language...

this is, i feel, a huge problem with how markdown has evolved.

the parsing model shouldn't be tangled up in the specifics of
the implementation in any particular language/compiler/tool.
you should be able to use pseudocode to explain it robustly...
in which case it could be easily translated to _any_ language.
plus then it also gives _equivalent_results_ in every language.

and, quite frankly, i'm simply amazed nobody is saying this...

(ok, i _suspect_ pandoc john is saying something fairly close,
and that this is the change that fletcher recently got from him,
but that explanation is chock-full of computer-science jargon,
thus way over the head of this dumb phat spare-room hacker.)

take the model i use to analyze z.m.l. (i don't call it "a
parser",
because every time i call something that, it gets bug-infested,
and then as soon as i _stop_ calling it that, it turns bug-free).

my model is so simple the average person can understand it
-- a big plus when you want average people to use your app.

this also means it is easy to port my model to any language.
i've ported it myself to perl and python, and i am a stranger
to both of them.   (until a month ago, i'd never used python.)

i use splits and joins, string arrays, substrings, and simple
loops like if-then and while-wend...   and that's all.   really...

so if a person understands basic or perl or python, i think 
they can port my code to any another language in one hour.
or, if they work directly from my pseudocode, three hours...

so i'm puzzled why, for markdown, it seems _so_difficult_.

-bowerbird
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