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The text/markdown media type
- qewrffewqwfqew 11y agoThe following RFC which sketches out a system for registration of markdown variants is much more interesting: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764 Maybe, eventually, I'll be able to open a markdown textarea on a new website and be able to predict what markup will actually work!
- voltagex_ 11y agoYep, but I can't remember the difference between Chrome Markdown, Firefox Markdown and Edge Markdown. - me, in the future. I have a hard enough time with GitHub Markdown and Reddit Markdown, as it is.
- codinghorror 11y agoObligatory: http://commonmark.org http://commonmark.org
- creshal 11y agoThat was a jab at browsers and their history of not supporting specs identically. HTML5 is also a "strongly defined" specification and it didn't help.
- cballard 11y agoLooks like fenced blocks are part of the spec - will you be adding them to SO?
- untothebreach 11y agocodinghorror no longer works at SO http://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/ http://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/
- treve 11y agoYea! Great read.
- amelius 11y agoPerhaps what we need is a registry in which we can store (functional) descriptions for converting markdown variants to e.g. HTML and back.
- r0muald 11y agoThere's a typo on page 6: [f0o]
- dsr_ 11y agoRead the context: that's deliberate.
- Animats 11y agoMarkdown as a media type will have arrived when the first spam email is sent in markdown.
- MichaelBurge 11y agoThe pushers("Pandango, Inc.") run a webmail service, so I think the intention of this is that if you wanted to write an email with more expressive styling, you could use markdown instead of having to write HTML.
- _ZeD_ 11y agosigh I never understood why markdown (given it's lack of formal spec) "won" the light markup battle... I still think restructuredtext is syntactically better equipped and pleased to read...
- therealmarv 11y ago3 reasons (for me)... all of this are harder to write and to remember in restructured text: source code blocks, links and images. Also sections definition is totally fuzzy for me http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#sections http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex... Markdown can work more like your mind. Restructured text is still too much like programming.
- mineo 11y agoI agree on the section definitions. It's very hard to remember which underline I need to use because every project (or even document) can just define their own order implicitly. The sphinx project recommends a specific order somewhere in their documentation that I look up every time I need to write rst, but markdowns just-count-the-hashes is much easier.
- dalai 11y agoI personally prefer Asciidoc(tor). The syntax for the basic stuff (headings, source code, links) is at least as easy as for markdown, but it also allows more advanced cases (tables, splitting into files, text substitutions, etc.) without resorting to writing html or using external tools. Asciidoctor also directly supports the markdown style for headings, block quotes, etc. I see markdown more for writing a quick note or something that will not exceed a few pages.
- gbog 11y agoSame here. Nothing can be built upon Markdown mostly because it allows raw html. Many nice and solid extensions have been made for rst.
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- nness 11y agoShouldn't it be text/plain? I would've though that a specific mime-type defeats the format's original purpose.
- troels 11y agoWell, text/html is also pretty non-specific.
- jalfresi 11y agoExactly! I thought the point was that it was plain text that can be transposed to html. This mime-type designates it as a mark-UP, defeating the whole point!
- scrollaway 11y agoMime type parenting is a thing. There's plenty of IANA-registered mime types which have text/plain, application/zip etc as parents.
- rcarmo 11y agoFigure 1 alone is a good reason to peek at the RFC. So glad someone is keeping RFC-style "diagrams" alive :)
- LoSboccacc 11y agoWith the author so against standardization of his child, why aren't them pushing text/commonmark instead?
- franciscop 11y agoExactly my thought, also markdown is inconsistent at places
- wtbob 11y agoWell, it's a Request for Comments; I think that yours is a pretty good comment to submit.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoThat's a interesting point never occured to me to comment on these. Went to the ietf website but there was no apparent way to comment. I'll try later on a pc
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- stronglikedan 11y agoThere's no way to comment on the website directly, so I think they are requesting that comments be submitted via email. I found this towards the bottom: > Contact Information: > (individual) John Gruber <http://daringfireball.net/> http://daringfireball.net/> > <comments@daringfireball.net>
- diggan 11y agoI think you would rather want to contact the author of the RFC than Gruber. Author's Address Sean Leonard Penango, Inc. 5900 Wilshire Boulevard 21st Floor Los Angeles, CA 90036 United States Email: dev+ietf@seantek.com URI: http://www.penango.com/
- rhythmvs 11y agoRelated discussion on the CommonMark (markdown standardization initiative) forum: http://talk.commonmark.org/t/ietf-request-for-input-text-markdown-media-type/700 http://talk.commonmark.org/t/ietf-request-for-input-text-mar...
- h43k3r 11y agoIs it right now to expect browsers to render markdown file natively?
- slang800 11y agoNo - this spec is just for defining a media type. I doubt that browsers are going to touch Markdown anytime soon, given the number of flavors we have right now. However, you can do it with a plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-view...
- tehwalrus 11y agoLaTeX is given as an example of a markup language alongside HTML. Is it allowed to be both that and a turing-complete programming language?
- geraldbauer 11y agoFYI: Following the HTML model I've started a Can I Use ___ ? version for markdown e.g. Can I Use footnotes, tables, heading ids, citations, definition lists, etc. -> http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-use http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-use Still early. For an example page see Can I Use Heading Attributes? -> http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-use/heading_attributes http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-use/heading_attr... Cheers.
- rubidium 11y agoHurry up :) Figures, captions, and tables are the ones I need to know.
- deadowl 11y agoI don't know if this is how you'd do it in markdown. My text tables are generally done this way: +-----------+-----------+-----------+ | label a | label b | label c | +-----------+-----------+-----------+ | r1f1 | r1f2 | r1f3 | +-----------+-----------+-----------+ | r2f1 | r2f2 | r2f3 | +-----------+-----------+-----------+
- sandyarmstrong 11y agoGitHub Flavored Markdown version: https://help.github.com/articles/organizing-information-with-tables/ https://help.github.com/articles/organizing-information-with...
- geraldbauer 11y agoSee [Pandoc's Markdown](http://pandoc.org/README.html#pandocs-markdown http://pandoc.org/README.html#pandocs-markdown) that has everything. Will add all pandoc extensions over the next couple of days to the Can I Use ___ ? site. Cheers. PS: To quote: Extension: implicit_figures An image occurring by itself in a paragraph will be rendered as a figure with a caption. The image’s alt text will be used as the caption. Extension: table_captions A caption may optionally be provided with all 4 kinds of tables. A caption is a paragraph beginning with the string Table: (or just :), which will be stripped off. It may appear either before or after the table. And so on.
- geraldbauer 11y agoFYI: Another markdown news byte. I've started a dedicated Markdown news channel trying to cover tools, book formats, extension, tips & tricks and more. Follow along on twitter -> https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews Cheers.
- mkj 11y agoIs the intent of this RFC to move towards useragents accepting markdown to render? If not, what's the purpose of an IANA registered type?
- buro9 11y agoWebmail. Penango (the company of the author) is a webmail company and so I would imagine that they wish to declare a mimetype so that they can default to supplying a MIME part that is text/markdown as the body of a message.
- mkj 11y agoAh, thanks. I guess a simple markup for email would be nice, but cannot see it being adopted enough to make it worthwhile for senders.
- buro9 11y agoIt's quite a nice solution... as you can believe that the text part is formatted reasonably well enough that you could present it as the text/plain part to external systems, and yet you know that you can also transform it to create the text/html part for other systems. Whilst you only need to store the one part, the text/markdown. It also gives you the ability to run a sanitizer after the markdown transformation, so that if you are a webmail host (as they are) you've got this really nice place to perform sanitization of what will be the email HTML before you send it to your web page.
- aidenn0 11y agoDoes anybody know if RFC-1563[1] was adopted by many e-mail clients? 1: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1563 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1563
- antirez 11y agoMarkdown is a case study in "worse is better". It's a great idea, the fact that human/machine friction must be reduced to the essential for this kind of application, and that 99% of the times you need just the basic features: titles, italic, bold, lists, unformatted code blocks, and a few more. But this initial intuition, was not supported by a good design, since the evil is in the details. I hope somebody will build a new syntax based on this initial intuition, but doing a better work. The key point to understand, IMHO, is that Markdown is an user interface. That's why strongly-engineering-minded people fail to provide something that people want to use, and why instead Markdown won.