4 ms·

The problem is that this is a discussion about standardising the Markdown syntax, not changing it.

• ars 14y ago
  Wikipedia also uses markdown. So since there is no standard format for URLs, let's pick a good one. Also, it could support both of these syntaxes at once - they don't conflict.
• buro9 14y ago
  The fact that Meteor wish to call this Rockdown suggests to me it is to change it. By creating a specification and tests, they will be modifying Markdown even if just subtly enough to remove bugs and ambiguity. Doing even that is to create something that isn't Markdown, existing Markdown parsers may do something different with the same text... so clearly this isn't Markdown. It may share 90% (or more, or less) similarity with Markdown, but some areas would certainly need tweaking and changing to make the goal (specification, testability, consistent implementations) possible. To my understanding this means that Rockdown is Markdown inspired/derived. And as such, that there is a hope that a good specification and the ability to be implemented in a testable and consistent way... will, by mass use (on the sites mentioned), eventually result in Rockdown superseding Markdown. In my universe, I'm simply looking to get rid of bbcode as the markup syntax of choice. And if you were at the support end of trying to tell people how to insert images on forums then you'd understand that the Markdown syntax is a real difficulty for a lot of people. The path that I prefer is to use Markdown, but the areas that cause the greatest difficulty in usability testing, to modify those to make things more implicit and frictionless. Worrying about []() (or vice versa) is an obstacle to the user that shouldn't exist. But if everything else is good from a user perspective then I definitely want to keep that stuff.