[Solar-talk] Markdown Info

[Paul M Jones]

On Aug 9, 2006, at 7:15 PM, Rodrigo Moraes wrote:

> Now, curiosity: why Markdown, Paul?

Two reasons:  aesthetics, and algorithm.

I think Markdown looks prettier, in plain text, than any other markup  
I've seen.  That's one of its explicit design goals, in fact: to be  
readable in plain text.

<http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosophy>

And the processing algorithm is really nice.  Basically, it processes  
"block" rules at the top level, and the block rules then process  
spans within those blocks.  This is as opposed to most wiki engines,  
including Text_Wiki, where blocks and spans are processed  
sequentially.  The Markdown algo lets you do things like have lists  
and code blocks within blockquotes, which is very difficult in other  
engines.

What Solar_Markdown adds to the basic algorithm is plugin-awareness.   
With the procedural Markdown, you need to edit the code directly to  
add new markup rules.  With Solar_Markdown, as with Text_Wiki, you  
just write a new rule class, and then specify where it should go in  
the parsing process via $config['rules'].


--

Paul M. Jones  <http://paul-m-jones.com>

Solar: Simple Object Library and Application Repository
for PHP5.   <http://solarphp.com>

Savant: The simple, elegant, and powerful solution for
templates in PHP.   <http://phpsavant.com>