Footnote support in Markdown

[Jonathan Deber]

Hi All.

I've just started using Markdown for my blog.

So far it seems quite nice, but the one issue I've run into is a lack 
of "native" support for footnotes.  I think that Daring Fireball's 
footnote style makes a lot of sense, and that's what I intend to use. 
However, it is a bit cumbersome to implement that style from within 
Markdown.

I notice that the PHP Markdown Extra project has Daring 
Fireball-style footnote support, and it seems to be implemented in 
quite an intuitive manner.  I was wondering if there were any plans 
to bring this functionality over to the standard Markdown.  Just out 
of curiosity, John, how do you do the footnotes for Daring Fireball?

(Actually, I do have one feature suggestion for the PHP Markdown 
Extra syntax.  If you're posting to a CMS system where multiple 
articles may appear on the same HTML page, you need to assign each 
article a GUID so that the footnote links make sense (i.e., you can't 
have two articles that both use "fnref" as the anchor name for the 
footnotes, since you would end up with two anchors with the same name 
if two articles are published on the same page).  It's of course 
possible to do this with a search and replace of "fnref" to something 
like "2007-01-23-1" prior to publishing.  But, it would be nice if 
you could specify a document GUID and have the Markdown processor do 
that substitution for you.)

I'm sorry if this has been discussed before; I didn't notice any 
mention of it on the list archives, but the search functionality 
seems to be a bit lacking.

Anyway, any information would be appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Jonathan