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On Tue, 24 Sep 2013 18:56:33 +0100
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccre...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> hasufell <hasuf...@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > I wonder if it would make any sense to take the effort to convert
> > markdown docs to html format before installing them.
>
> Aren't there thirty seven different incompatible formats all called
> "markdown", all of which require different tools to process correctly?
Yeah, there are. But do we need to support them all? A lot of these
formats are used on websites alone; so, they are not relevant here. If
you boil it down to formats you store, use or process locally, it gets
shorter. Do we actually want to process all the alternatives correctly?
=======================================================================
TL;DR: Lack of standardization is a mess, let's work with what we have.
=======================================================================
When I hear Markdown I think about where it all started:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
And I would propose we focus on that syntax to start with; if we want
to support a widely used alternative, we could implement support for
specifying which format is used and use a compatible converter.
We then come down to a popular alternative:
https://help.github.com/articles/github-flavored-markdown
Yes, I can see what you mean, it leads to certain inconsistencies; and
David Greenspan (not the actor; founder of EtherPad, now working
on Meteor) also noticed that about a year ago. He reached out to Jeff
Atwood which shared the same thought and reached out to a lot of people:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/10/the-future-of-markdown.html
But apparently, this doesn't seem to have worked out so well; this is
because it is often used within the context of a website and the
Markdown contents aren't really exchanged among websites.
They are not really trying to standardize a protocol here, but rather
something people use when writing out a comment on some website; if
users then switch from Stack Overflow to Reddit they will barely tell
the differences in the particular behavior the syntax would produce.
GitHub is kind of an exception here, they allow you to place files in
your repository that you can read on their site or read on your device
as plain-text, using a Markdown viewer or a converter.
While a Markdown viewer has existed before that and you could just do
it; I don't recall it being common use in the back of the days, it's
only when you plan to exchange it across communities and / or people
that a standard becomes a necessity. GitHub has introduced exchanging.
But, are there other alternatives? Yes, there is the original; some
people might be writing their repository's README.md in that format,
unintended, then not noticing that GitHub reads it a bit differently.
It's going to be hard, but I think we might want to let the user decide
which particular implementation is in favor; or give the user some way
to switch back in forth, or let the user have the choice to use some
converter that attempts to implement the best of each format.
As long as websites use Markdown in their own way; we will be unable to
use a standard, let alone ensure that all the Markdown files we get to
read are in a particular standard for Markdown files in repositories.
Not until the big Markdown consumers step up and change the game.
Let's work with what we are given for now; but indeed, we should be
well aware that no standard is present and the future can change.
- --
With kind regards,
Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer
E-mail address : tom...@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
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