John MacFarlane
American philosopher of language and logic at UC Berkeley and the creator of the document converter pandoc and co-author of the CommonMark specification.
John MacFarlane did not write this page.
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Their wordsBut this respect for the past has made the CommonMark spec a very complicated beast.
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Their wordsthe burdens of maintaining backwards compatibility are light in comparison with the enormous practical costs of moving existing systems to a new light markup language.
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Our reading
Making intraword emphasis harder is a good tradeoff for simpler emphasis rules in Markdown.
Their wordsIntraword emphasis is extremely rare, so it’s a good tradeoff to make it a little harder, in exchange for simplifying the rules (and conceptual model) for emphasis in general.
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Their wordsSince we have fenced code blocks, we don’t need indented code blocks. So, we can just get rid of them.
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Their wordsInstead of passing through raw HTML, we should introduce a special syntax that allows passing through raw content of any format.
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Their wordsWe should require a blank line between paragraph text and a list. Always.