ok, while i was in the process of writing that last post, fletcher and john weighed in themselves. that's good. i can say some things that they can't, though, so i will. fletcher told you how multimarkdown is booming, and it was an impressive list. what you might not realize is, he _undersold_ it. it is even bigger than he described, and it's gonna _double_ in size in the next six months. all you other variants are toast. even if you all could manage to form a consensus (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen) where you eliminated your own inconsistencies, you couldn't overcome the lead multimarkdown will soon have. but if you wanna _try_, i would suggest that you use textmate as your workhorse. with the coming alpha of v2.0, which odgaard has promised "by christmas", this "much-anticipated" release of a high-profile app is the _only_ thing that would have a fighting chance against the juggernaut multimarkdown will soon be. because if you don't have a text-editor that can do an on-the-fly display of output, you'll go nowhere. that's the standard; that's why you'd need textmate. but that assumes (1) that you could do it, which is highly laughable, and (2) that odgaard would even want to take such a confrontational stance with his new version. it has been such a long time coming that he probably feels more than enough pressure from the existing demand, without adding _more_. he'd be a lot smarter to try to exist peacefully with multimarkdown by adopting the pandoc parser too. even though "composer" will be a competitive rival, textmate can count on its own existing user-base. but you script-based reg-ex markdown converters? you are history. your time passed. it's that simple. oh sure, your existing users will continue to use you. but you won't get any new users. you have no future. sayonara. -bowerbird p.s. fletcher, both pandoc and peg-leg come from john macfarlane, so i might mix up their labels, but i hardly think it matters much; same with lunamark. and i'm gonna umbrella everything you do under the name of "multimarkdown", and just let other people ask you the nature of your "latest greatest iteration". my purpose was to list the developments themselves, but i thank you for correcting the credit attributions. p.p.s. i probably should mention at some time that i can't say if my text-analysis methodology is "better" than john's parser, but i do know it's easier to grok. most especially if you ain't a computer-science grad. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20111020/dd761f84/attachment.htm>
TextMate is a fantastic program, and I still use it for my programming text-editing needs. I don't really use it for writing MMD anymore, but that's just me. There will be a cross-section of users that fall into the target audiences for both, but I see TM and Composer as serving fundamentally different purposes. TM can do much (but not all) of what Composer does. Composer can only do a fraction of what TM does. My target audience consists of users who view that as a feature, and those who view TM as too complicated when all they want to do is write text documents using Markdown or MultiMarkdown. The main problem with TM v1 is that the language definition files are somewhat limited. I had to jump through a lot of hoops to try and define the MMD language (and most of that was already done for Markdown by Michael Sheets.) I have abandoned working on the syntax matching aspects, because it's just not capable of doing it properly. It is perfectly capable of handling MMD in all other aspects however (generating previews, exporting LaTeX, etc). I don't know if TM 2.0 will use a fundamentally different parser, and whether that parser will be capable of accurately defining a syntax such as Markdown. If so, then TM could be a perfectly good app for writing MD/MMD documents, and it would be more customizable than Composer for those who like to tinker with plugins and bundles. F- -- Fletcher T. Penney fletcher at fletcherpenney.net -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20111020/fa9352fa/attachment.htm> -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 4899 bytes Desc: not available Url : <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20111020/fa9352fa/attachment.bin>
No doubt there will always be a place for markdown support in the major text editors (vim, emacs, textmate). Support in those editors for parser based syntax highlighting instead of the usual pile of regexes would be dreamy, and would, I suspect, have benefits that go far beyond markdown. Anyone know if anyone is working on this for any of the big 3?
On Oct 20, 2011, at 2:33 PM, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote:> all you other variants are toast.Think of all the revenue they?re about to lose!!!> even if you all could manage to form a consensus > (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen) where you > eliminated your own inconsistencies, you couldn't > overcome the lead multimarkdown will soon have.If you find a tool you like, why can?t you just use it and enjoy it? What?s with all the unprovoked, unauthoritative announcements of a ?winner?? What does that even mean in this context? (That last one was rhetorical. Please don?t answer? Oh, God. You?re going to answer it aren?t you?) -- Rob McBroom <http://www.skurfer.com/>
On Oct 20, 2011, at 2:33 PM, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote:> all you other variants are toast.Think of all the revenue they?re about to lose!!!> even if you all could manage to form a consensus > (yeah, right, like that's gonna happen) where you > eliminated your own inconsistencies, you couldn't > overcome the lead multimarkdown will soon have.If you find a tool you like, why can?t you just use it and enjoy it? What?s with all the unprovoked, unauthoritative announcements of a ?winner?? What does that even mean in this context? (That last one was rhetorical. Please don?t answer? Oh, God. You?re going to answer it aren?t you?) -- Rob McBroom <http://www.skurfer.com/>