On 5/04/2013, at 2:00 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
Would it be too much to ask that a notation be used which has a formal syntax and a formal semantics?
We will document our superset, sure. That's what others did as well. The point is using Markdown as the shared base.
Nononono. Sure, the others "documented" their supersets. But they did *NOT* provide what I am asking for: - a FORMAL SYNTAX and - a FORMAL SEMANTICS. I tried to use one of these systems, and found myself unable to determine which combinations of features were legal and what legal combinations of features *meant*. I corresponded with some people who had built markdown parsers, and the answer was the same each time: they had reversed engineered some other parser (typically a Perl one) and bashed on it until they were bug-compatible. If I want to get a particular effect in LaTeX or even in HTML+CSS, I can usually figure it out *without* having to run any program. If I want to get a particular effect in Markdown, I flounder around and end up doing without. I am sick of "documentation" that vaguely hints at things, and I am especially sick of Markdown so-called documentation. To say it one more time: I was unable to use the official Markdown documentation, http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax, to guide the construction of a parser. For example, <br> is a valid URL enclosed in <. . .>, so is it a link, as the "Automatic Links" section would suggest, or is it embedded HTML, as the "Inline HTML" section would suggest? Can you tell *from the documentation*? For another example, is *foo**bar**ugh* supposed to map to <em>foo<strong>bar</strong>ugh</em> or to <em>foo</em><em>bar</em><em>ugh</em>? Again, I'm not asking "what does this or that *program* do", I'm asking "can you tell from the documentation what they *ought* to do?" If there is an unambiguous specification of Markdown somewhere (specification; not program), I would be glad to see it.