Markdown and Gemini

[Brian Evans]

I have changed the subject, but this is a continuation of the text reflow convo...
but the conversation has drifted and I felt a new subject was in order.

Sean writes:
> The issue I have with Markdown is that there is no one standard for it. 
> Mark Gruber created it in 2004 as a way for *him* to create HTML documents
> without having to write HTML (or use a clumsy HTML editor) and he had no
> desire to add to it (because it works for him).  Since then, multiple
> versions have been created to address shortcomings people came across as
> they tried using Markdown for their own use, and as of right now, defined in
> RFC-7763 and RFC-7764, are the various flavors of Markdown[...]

I agree with Sean that the lack of a standard is an issue. Additionally, most
versions of markdown allow for embedded html as well as inline images. I
believe the majority of us were against these things. In additional to 
philosophical disagreements there are issues, as Sean also writes, with
the mandate that a simple client should be buildable as a weekend project.

Having said the things above, I like markdown. I think it is a good fit for what
we have been floating around with this project on the whole. I think it has a lot
of strengths. Given the issues above (coding-effort-wise and philosophy-wise)
it feels like the only way to make things work is to define a dialect of markdown
as a standard that is a part of the gemini spec (though it could have its own
spec as well and just reference that in the gemini spec). 

If that route were chosen, I think we would need to create parsers that return 
an AST in a variety of languages and make the libraries available to developers 
to use in their gemini projects. This would be a pretty big undertaking and I do not
know that it is exactly in scope. But we do seem to keep coming back to
markdown as a good option that pretty much everyone likes at least some
elements of.

I'm very open to other suggestions and look forward to hearing other paths
forward.


-- 
Sent with https://mailfence.com
Secure and private email