Metadata syntax (was Universal syntax for Markdown)

[Rob McBroom]

On Sep 19, 2011, at 3:28 PM, John MacFarlane wrote:


> I can think of many reasons for putting an abstract into metadata.

> The treatment of the abstract (like that of author and title) varies

> quite a bit depending on the output format.  In LaTeX, it goes in

> a special environment; in HTML, it may go in a special DIV; for some

> purposes, you may want to omit it entirely and just store it for

> bibliographic purposes.  If the markdown processor pulls it out

> as metadata, then a templating system can put it where it needs to

> go in the final document.


Those sound like reasons for the metadata to *identify* the abstract, but I see no requirement that it must be literally *stored* there. If the metadata contained something like

    abstract: relative/path/to/abstract.mdown

That would allow for all of the above scenarios while keeping the metadata syntax/section simple.

(Obviously, I lean toward Fletcher’s philosophy #2 on this.)

-- 
Rob McBroom
<http://www.skurfer.com/>