Personally I think Markdown sucks, although perhaps less than Haddock markup.

Still:

* No document meta data

* No code block meta data like language for syntax highlighting

* No tables

* No footnotes

* HTML fallback is insecure

* Confusing syntax (is it []() or ()[] for links?)

* Syntax that gets in the way (maybe I don't want *stars* emphasized)

* Above point leads to non-standard dialects like "GitHub Markdown" (no, GitHub doesn't use markdown)

* Not extensible, leading to even more non-standard hacks and work-arounds (GitHub Markdown, Pandoc Markdown, other Markdown libraries have their own incompatible extensions)

* Not well suited for web input (e.g. four-space indentation for code blocks), although not that important for Haddock

An important thing to note here is that no, Markdown has *not* won because no one is actually using *Markdown*.  They're using their own, custom and incompatible dialects.

Only two of the above points apply to reStructuredText (web input and syntax getting in the way), and those particular points don't apply to Creole.  Therefore I tend to advocate Creole for web applications and reStructuredText for documents.

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 6:49 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

Haddock's current markup language leaves something to be desired once
you want to write more serious documentation (e.g. several paragraphs
of introductory text at the top of the module doc). Several features
are lacking (bold text, links that render as text instead of URLs,
inline HTML).

I suggest that we implement an alternative haddock syntax that's a
superset of Markdown. It's a superset in the sense that we still want
to support linkifying Haskell identifiers, etc. Modules that want to
use the new syntax (which will probably be incompatible with the
current syntax) can set:

{-# HADDOCK Markdown #-}

on top of the source file.

Ticket: http://trac.haskell.org/haddock/ticket/244

-- Johan

_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe