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StrictMark

https://lobste.rs/s/lbqaev/strictmark_rational_markdown

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Even though I submitted this I’m not endorsing this. I submitted it because I found it interesting and wanted to know what the community thought about it.

I’m a big fan of the OG Markdown (I still use the original Perl filter released by Gruber), and I appreciate the work of the CommonMark project to nail down all the variants that have sprung up over the years.

This project however grinds my gears. The original intention of MD was *for the computer to do the work* - writing HTML by hand is tedious and error prone, and by giving the MD pre-processor a clean plain-text file to work with the author could concentrate on the content. This project veers too far into the territory of making life easier for the parser/computer. Restricting link references to one fricking character is __insane__. There’s simply no justification for it other than making it slightly easier to write a grammar.[1]

Same with disallowing \* as a bullet point. It’s literally the punctuation character that looks the most like a bullet! And it can work as one, as MD and CommonMark have shown. Sure, it’s harder to write a *parser* but why should I, a user, give a fig about how hard it is to program?

And yes, it’s messy that \_this is italic\_ and \_\_this is bold\_\_, but guess what, some people like to use underscore for emphasis and some like to use asterisks. Again, allowing both makes it easier for writers, harder for programmers. Tough noogies.

People are free to create whatever they want and to share it with the world. And nerds being nerds, it’s really easy for us to try to “fix” Markdown by adding strict rules. I think we should leave MD be and promote those plain-text-to-HTML formats that already cover these things.

[1] I have similar gripes with Gemini not allowing inline links - even if they’re only reference links.

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✽ Sunday, 2021-01-31

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