Re: What's in this project for implementers?

Below is my first draft of a message to implementers. Please let me know if
I'm missing any vital information or being unclear about anything.

Thanks,
Ryan

-- message follows --

Greetings,
I don't need to tell you what a great tool Markdown is. As a simple and
intuitive syntax that looks good as plain text and can be converted to
sensible, attractive output in other formats, it's an amazing
low-barrier-to-entry way to help people create attractive documents. It has
very shallow learning curve and, once you're familiar with the basics,
mostly just stays out of your way and lets you get things done.

However, it's undeniable that it has its problems. Some of its rules,
especially when dealing with edge cases, aren't totally clear. Maybe it has
too many options; maybe it doesn't have enough. In any case, it's a fact
that while the basic syntax is pretty good, there are some rough edges that
need to be ironed out. That's why there are so many different markdown
flavors in the wild, and so many extensions to John Gruber's original
syntax. While this does mean that by choosing the appropriate
implementation you can get exactly the functionality you're looking for, it
also means that learning how to use that implementation is more difficult,
and once you start using it you may not be able to move your documents to
another without a lot of clean-up work.

I'm writing to you on behalf of the recently-formed W3C Markdown Community
Group (http://www.w3.org/community/markdown/) because you've been
identified as the lead of a software project that consumes markdown syntax,
and we recognize that you undoubtedly have a lot of valuable insight about
markdown.

Our goal, briefly, is to specify an unambiguous markdown syntax in order to
allow easier implementation testing, simplify the learning process in order
to expand markdown's usage, and increase portability of documents between
implementations. To accomplish this, we want to make sure we're taking into
account as many different thoughts, ideas, and concerns as possible. As an
implementer, we particularly value your insight into the problems you've
encountered and feedback you've received over the course of building your
implementation, and we want to know how you think a markdown specification
would benefit you, your users, and the web community as a whole.

If you'd like to help out, please consider joining the group by creating a
w3.org account and signing up at http://www.w3.org/community/markdown/join/.
Alternatively, if you'd prefer to just provide one-time feedback, just send
me your thoughts and I'll pass them on to the group. Again, we want to make
sure we're working towards a beneficial solution to actual problems you've
encountered, so anything you can provide to guide us in that direction is
very welcome.

Thanks,
Ryan Freebern



On Wed, Nov 21, 2012 at 3:20 PM, marbux <marbux@gmail.com> wrote:

> Aristotle Pagaltzis identified the key players we need to involve in
> this post. <
> http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2012-November/002772.html
> >.
> You might consider recycling some of the text I wrote to introduce
> this effort on that mailing list. See
> <
> http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2012-November/002773.html
> >.
>
> Paul
>