Maruku: a better Markdown interpreter for Ruby.

Jan Erik Moström lists at mostrom.pp.se
Sat Dec 30 10:01:51 EST 2006


Reply to Andrea Censi <andrea at censi.org> 06-12-30 12:24:


>Again, I understand you concern that all Markdown implementations

>should give the same results. But at the moment, and I think that is

>not only my opinion, the Markdown specification has a lot of holes. So

>even if wanted, I could not make Maruku "Markdown 1.0 compatible".


I don't think it's a matter of copying the bugs it's a matter
what the actual commands are. I already see a number of
variations of Markdown (supersets) and I personally think this
is "dangerous" ... if it's Markdown encoded text it should be
rendered correctly (bugs are as I say a different thing) by all
Markdown implementations.


>I promise one thing: if Markdown2 will be released with a decent set

>of features (tables, footnotes, definition lists, metadata) and a

>clear documentation (if it's not a formal grammar, at least an

>unambiguous specification), then Maruku will be Markdown2-canonical as

>its primary mode of operation.


I think there is one very important thing here to consider,
readability of the source. One of the reasons I like Markdown is
that it's (in my opinion) more readable than what for example
reStructuredText <http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html> use.
I want to be able to take the "source" and paste it in an email
message and it should be perfectly readable to my dad when he
gets it ... and the same text should be able to produce a HTML
page (and LaTeX if I could wish).

If the penalty for this is that I have to forget about certain
markup abilities then OK ... I can live with that. I would of
course like to have both readable source and a "full fledged"
markup language but the first is much more important for me ...
otherwise I would have used reStructuredText.

jem


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