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It's dawned on me why this is the case. Gruber's Markdown has this goal: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy http://daringfireball.ne
by buro9 12y ago
It's dawned on me why this is the case.
Gruber's Markdown has this goal: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosoph...
> Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.
That's it... that's the single big idea that drives the philosophy of Markdown.
And how about Standard Markdown? http://standardmarkdown.com/#how http://standardmarkdown.com/#how
> one of our major goals is to make Markdown easier to parse, and to eliminate the many old inconsistencies and ambiguities that made writing a Markdown parser so difficult.
Markdown and Standard Markdown have very different goals.
One is designed to make it easy for end users to read and write content for the web, the other is designed to make it easy for developers to parse and process content for the web.
The purpose is no longer the same, a subtle shift has occurred.
- Too 12y agoBy fulfilling the second goal you make it easier for users to write the same kind of markdown on different sites or copy-paste between sites, thus fulfilling the first goal.
- buro9 12y agoWhen it's decision time, one of those goals will override the other. For a lot of cases it may be true that fulfilling the second fulfils the first. But crucially, not for all cases. They are not equal goals, one does not fully imply the other (in either direction). Yes, a better balance could be struck than today... but if the second goal is trumping the first... the users will suffer.