Re: Markdown: simple syntax for arbitrary nesting

[Fritz Fritzy <emile.valjean-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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Thanks for the answer!

RE nesting: 
I mean things like the use of asterisk inside emphasis/bold spans, or the 
different ways paragraphs/lists/quotes/pre blocks work together wrt 
indentation and newlines.
I understand that when one knows the parsing rules, it's probably always 
doable to make them do what one wants, but personally I often get them 
wrong.

RE markdown's design: 
As far as I can tell, markdown has grown way farther than those initial 
goals, and is now used for more than simple email-like content.
Looking at all the different extensions defined and e.g. provided by 
pandoc, I believ that ease of readability has been already left out: one 
has to know the semantics of footnotes, custom spans, custom divs, 
attribute blocks already to know how to read them.
Obviously, adding yet another new syntax construct can be seen as just 
adding to the already present overhead, but it seems to me like:

   1. It's easy to reason about, in that nesting is natural to understand, 
   and its parsing rules being (close to?) context free makes figuring out how 
   to make it work easier.
   2. It would be enough to replace/cover quite a few of the already 
   present constructs (e.g. all the divs and spans, and maybe also attribute 
   blocks for titles?), thus reducing the cognitive cost both for writing and 
   reading markdown.
   3. On a similar note, it would mean that e.g. when writing things like 
      1. emphasized text containing asterisks, one could just start with 
      *{}*, and not have to fear that the emphasis gets dropped.
      2. any kind of block, say a list item, or a quote block, one could 
      use braces again to reset the indentation to any value we like.
      
In short, it seems to me that it's a simple enough, orthogonal and rather 
powerful syntax that doesn't _have_ to be used, but makes writing complex 
documents that much easier.

I understand that you and many people have probably spent way more time 
thinking about this than I have, and won't try to push my point further if 
it hasn't been in any way convincing so far :)

Thanks for your time, and for pandoc, which has already proven incredibly 
useful to me!

On Wednesday, October 25, 2023 at 2:58:32 PM UTC John MacFarlane wrote:

>
>
> > On Oct 24, 2023, at 11:06 PM, Fritz Fritzy <emile....-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Using markdown, I've often been frustrated by
> > 
> > • Its flat/non-recursive/non-nested nature, by which I mean that you 
> mostly cannot write "arbitrary" markdown inside most elements, and if you 
> can, you have to be very careful with whitespaces/indentation/etc.
>
>
> I'm not sure what you mean: generally you can nest things, you just have 
> to pay attention to the syntax. Examples?
>
>
> > • The impossibility to easily interlink to arbitrary parts of the 
> document.
> > To solve both issues, I'd like to propose an extension that allows 
> "simply" using braces (or some other punctuation pair) to allow nesting, 
> with an option to tag/add attributes to the contents like that.
>
>
> I think this goes against the spirit of Markdown, which prioritizes source 
> readability rather than easy writeability.
>
> "The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it 
> as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown- formatted document 
> should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been 
> marked up with tags or formatting instructions." (
> http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
>
>
>

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