Re: [dev] A language similar to Markdown that sucks less

On 8/22/2010 12:47 PM, David J Patrick wrote:
> On 10-08-22 12:37 PM, Alexander Teinum wrote:
>> What doesn’t work well for me, is that I cannot easily extend
>> Markdown. The design that I propose is simpler and more strict. All
>> tags work the same way. The input is close to a data structure, and it
>> doesn’t need complex parsing. The drawback is that tables and lists
>> need more characters:
>
> pandoc extends markdown and has some table support,
> djp
>

The problem with all these Markdown extensions is that they come as
packages with monolithic parsers, so if you like the pandoc syntax for
one kind of entity but the PHP markdown extensions syntax for another,
you're screwed. This is a problem with latex as well, all syntax for
complex structures like tables must derive from the base tex syntax.
Hence the source code for tables looks ridiculous in latex. The troff
idea of multiple passes with different parsers translating each type of
entity into a base representation solves this problem nicely and should
be emulated more. I wonder why troff never really caught on in the
academic community.
Received on Sun Aug 22 2010 - 21:20:51 CEST