Syntax Questions

[Jacob Rus]

Jurgens du Toit wrote:

> If you look at a formatter like tidy, it's got a lot of options where you

> can turn certain behaviour on and off, making it much more useable for a lot

> of people. Wouldn't it improve the usability of Markdown if these kind of

> options were present?


No, it would be a compatibility nightmare, for no benefit.


> Another thing, is it possible to convert newlines to <br/> tags? I tried

> nl2br before and after passing the string to markdown, but either way

> there's to many br tags then.


Put two spaces at the end of a line to insert a line break like this.


> Is it a bug or a feature that the following two texts get formatted

> differently?

>

> My shopping list

> + Bread

> + Milk

> + Cheese


It is most definitely a feature.  Imagine you had text something like:

     To calculate the result, we add the two numbers 5
     + 6, and we obtain the sum 11.  Then we compute 11
     - 2.

It would be horribly inconvenient if this was interpreted as a list. 
(Forgive the contrived example.)

-Jacob