Hi markdown-discuss Folks: I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type for all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>. The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In particular we need to better understand and document what versions of Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal syntaxes will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations have an easy way to be distinguished from one another. (See the "flavor" parameter discussed in the draft.) The draft is currently being discussed on apps-discuss at ietf.org. Kind regards, Sean Leonard Author of Markdown IETF Draft
I would strongly recommend thinking through some of the "political" decisions before getting too far into this. 1) "Markdown" officially refers to the implementation and syntax created by John Gruber. 2) "Markdown" the perl implementation has not seen a bug fix in nearly 10 years. 3) Gruber's voice has been noticeably absent from the list for a long time, except for a comment that I recall as basically saying that Markdown was essentially feature complete as far as he was concerned. 4) Gruber has specifically said in the past that new projects could not coopt the "Markdown" name and would have to be clearly disambiguated. For example, I would assume that anyone other than Gruber could not create "Markdown 2.0" to be the Markdown to rule them all... 5) I don't have numbers to back this up, but would strongly suspect that at this point very few people who think they use "Markdown" actually are. Most are using various derivatives that have made wide-ranging decisions on how to handle edge cases, etc. For most users, whose needs are very basic, the distinction is probably academic. But I would suggest that these distinctions are very important when it comes to official standards. I would propose that if there is to be an official standard based on "Markdown", it would first require defining what "Markdown" is. To do that would (hopefully) require a more formalized description of the grammar. If Gruber were to sign off on allowing this to use the "Markdown" name, fantastic. But if not, a difficult decision would need to be made: 1) Build a standard based on Markdown.pl, bugs and all, and keep the "Markdown" name. 2) Develop a formalized version of the core syntax of Markdown, and base the standard on this. Unless it were to receive Gruber's blessing, it would have to be named something other than Markdown. 3) Continue to use the term "Markdown" as a vague term that refers to a loosely related collection of tools, leaving users to wonder why a given document works with one tool, and not others. At some point, a new common standard (e.g. "Son of Markdown" or whatever) may or may not arise that would require redefining all of this stuff. Granted, efforts to organize such a standard have thus far failed despite multiple enthusiastic discussions over the years on this list. My $.02.... FTP On 7/9/14, 11:49 AM, Sean Leonard wrote:> Hi markdown-discuss Folks: > > I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task > Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type for > all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here: > <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>. > > The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list > that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In > particular we need to better understand and document what versions of > Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal syntaxes > will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations have an easy > way to be distinguished from one another. (See the "flavor" parameter > discussed in the draft.) > > The draft is currently being discussed on apps-discuss at ietf.org. > > Kind regards, > > Sean Leonard > Author of Markdown IETF Draft > _______________________________________________ > Markdown-Discuss mailing list > Markdown-Discuss at six.pairlist.net > http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss-- Fletcher T. Penney fletcher at fletcherpenney.net
Le 9-juil.-2014 ? 11:49, Sean Leonard <dev+ietf at seantek.com> a ?crit :> Hi markdown-discuss Folks: > > I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type for all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>. > > The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In particular we need to better understand and document what versions of Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal syntaxes will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations have an easy way to be distinguished from one another. (See the "flavor" parameter discussed in the draft.)The "flavor" parameter is a good idea in theory. I'm not sure it'll be very useful in general though. Nobody is going to annotate their file with the right flavor unless there's a tangible benefit, and I don't see what the benefit could be. Software that could do something useful with markdown-identified content will likely ignore the flavor part when parsing because no one wants to see "incompatible flavor" errors, especially when commonly used parts of the syntax are compatible anyway. Markdown is in the spot where HTML was before HTML5 with each implementation doing its own thing. I don't know if Markdown will get out of there anytime soon. I'll point out however that HTML never got anything like a "flavor" parameter in its MIME type, and even if it did it'd not have helped clear the mess in any way. -- Michel Fortin michel.fortin at michelf.ca http://michelf.ca
This seems a reasonable proposal to me. Like Michel Fortin, though, I suspect the "flavors" part will be more trouble than it's worth. Is there going to be a distinct flavor for every version of pandoc, for example? What about people who use pandoc but disable one or two of the pandoc extensions (which you can do with a command line flag)? Your document mentions "github flavored markdown," but there are actually two distinct github flavors, one for displaying long-form documents like READMEs (here hard line breaks are treated as spaces, as in original markdown), and one of issues and comments (here hard line breaks are rendered as hard breaks). It sounds like a LOT of work to keep the registry of flavors up to date, unless the flavors are going to be very coarse-grained. John +++ Sean Leonard [Jul 09 14 08:49 ]:>Hi markdown-discuss Folks: > >I am working on a Markdown effort in the Internet Engineering Task >Force, to standardize on "text/markdown" as the Internet media type >for all variations of Markdown content. You can read my draft here: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-seantek-text-markdown-media-type-00>. > >The proposal is already getting traction. Is there anyone on this list >that is interested in participating or helping this effort? In >particular we need to better understand and document what versions of >Markdown exist, so that either Markdown as a family of informal >syntaxes will start to converge, or if not, that Markdown variations >have an easy way to be distinguished from one another. (See the >"flavor" parameter discussed in the draft.) > >The draft is currently being discussed on apps-discuss at ietf.org. > >Kind regards, > >Sean Leonard >Author of Markdown IETF Draft >_______________________________________________ >Markdown-Discuss mailing list >Markdown-Discuss at six.pairlist.net >http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss