
The text/markdown media type - treve
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7763
======
qewrffewqwfqew
The following RFC which sketches out a system for registration of markdown
_variants_ is much more interesting:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7764)

Maybe, eventually, I'll be able to open a markdown textarea on a new website
and be able to predict what markup will actually work!

~~~
voltagex_
Yep, but I can't remember the difference between Chrome Markdown, Firefox
Markdown and Edge Markdown. - me, in the future. I have a hard enough time
with GitHub Markdown and Reddit Markdown, as it is.

~~~
codinghorror
Obligatory: [http://commonmark.org](http://commonmark.org)

~~~
cballard
Looks like fenced blocks are part of the spec - will you be adding them to SO?

~~~
untothebreach
codinghorror no longer works at SO

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-
exchange/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/farewell-stack-exchange/)

------
LoSboccacc
With the author so against standardization of his child, why aren't them
pushing text/commonmark instead?

~~~
wtbob
Well, it's a Request for Comments; I think that yours is a pretty good comment
to submit.

~~~
LoSboccacc
That's a interesting point never occured to me to comment on these. Went to
the ietf website but there was no apparent way to comment. I'll try later on a
pc

~~~
stronglikedan
There's no way to comment on the website directly, so I think they are
requesting that comments be submitted via email. I found this towards the
bottom:

> Contact Information:

> (individual) John Gruber
> <[http://daringfireball.net/>](http://daringfireball.net/>)

> <comments@daringfireball.net>

~~~
diggan
I think you would rather want to contact the author of the RFC than Gruber.

    
    
      Author's Address
    
       Sean Leonard
       Penango, Inc.
       5900 Wilshire Boulevard
       21st Floor
       Los Angeles, CA  90036
       United States
    
       Email: dev+ietf@seantek.com
       URI:   http://www.penango.com/

~~~
danyork
Correct, the author of the Internet-Draft is the one to contact.

------
_ZeD_
_sigh_ I never understood why markdown (given it's lack of formal spec) "won"
the light markup battle... I still think restructuredtext is syntactically
better equipped and pleased to read...

~~~
jacobolus
Probably because it was designed by a writer, for use by writers as-is,
inspired by existing plain-text email conventions.

Other light markup formats were designed by programmers, primarily for
computer consumption, with readability by humans as a secondary goal.

~~~
Swizec
This ^

It's a people problem, not a tech problem. I love writing in markdown because
when I write, my mind works differently than when I code.

Ideally I could do anything that sort of feels right and the computer will
just figure it out.

Markdown is the closest to that^ that I've ever used. It gets out of my way,
which is what I want from a tool.

The lack of pure fancy spec is a _feature_

------
geraldbauer
FYI: Following the HTML model I've started a Can I Use ___ ? version for
markdown e.g. Can I Use footnotes, tables, heading ids, citations, definition
lists, etc. -> [http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-
use](http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-use) Still early. For an
example page see Can I Use Heading Attributes? ->
[http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-
use/heading_attr...](http://manuscripts.github.io/markdown-can-i-
use/heading_attributes) Cheers.

~~~
rubidium
Hurry up :)

Figures, captions, and tables are the ones I need to know.

~~~
deadowl
I don't know if this is how you'd do it in markdown. My text tables are
generally done this way:

    
    
        +-----------+-----------+-----------+
        | label a   | label b   | label c   |
        +-----------+-----------+-----------+
        | r1f1      | r1f2      | r1f3      |
        +-----------+-----------+-----------+
        | r2f1      | r2f2      | r2f3      |
        +-----------+-----------+-----------+

~~~
sandyarmstrong
GitHub Flavored Markdown version:
[https://help.github.com/articles/organizing-information-
with...](https://help.github.com/articles/organizing-information-with-tables/)

------
antirez
Markdown is a case study in "worse is better". It's a great idea, the fact
that human/machine friction must be reduced to the essential for this kind of
application, and that 99% of the times you need just the basic features:
titles, italic, bold, lists, unformatted code blocks, and a few more. But this
initial intuition, was not supported by a good design, since the evil is in
the details. I hope somebody will build a new syntax based on this initial
intuition, but doing a better work.

The key point to understand, IMHO, is that Markdown is an user interface.
That's why strongly-engineering-minded people fail to provide something that
people want to use, and why instead Markdown won.

------
Animats
Markdown as a media type will have arrived when the first spam email is sent
in markdown.

------
rcarmo
Figure 1 alone is a good reason to peek at the RFC. So glad someone is keeping
RFC-style "diagrams" alive :)

------
rhythmvs
Related discussion on the CommonMark (markdown standardization initiative)
forum: [http://talk.commonmark.org/t/ietf-request-for-input-text-
mar...](http://talk.commonmark.org/t/ietf-request-for-input-text-markdown-
media-type/700)

------
nness
Shouldn't it be text/plain? I would've though that a specific mime-type
defeats the format's original purpose.

~~~
scrollaway
Mime type parenting is a thing. There's plenty of IANA-registered mime types
which have text/plain, application/zip etc as parents.

------
MichaelBurge
The pushers("Pandango, Inc.") run a webmail service, so I think the intention
of this is that if you wanted to write an email with more expressive styling,
you could use markdown instead of having to write HTML.

~~~
_ZeD_
? who talk about websites, javascript and whatnot?

------
geraldbauer
FYI: Another markdown news byte. I've started a dedicated Markdown news
channel trying to cover tools, book formats, extension, tips & tricks and
more. Follow along on twitter ->
[https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews](https://twitter.com/manuscriptsnews)
Cheers.

------
mkj
Is the intent of this RFC to move towards useragents accepting markdown to
render? If not, what's the purpose of an IANA registered type?

~~~
buro9
Webmail.

Penango (the company of the author) is a webmail company and so I would
imagine that they wish to declare a mimetype so that they can default to
supplying a MIME part that is text/markdown as the body of a message.

~~~
mkj
Ah, thanks. I guess a simple markup for email would be nice, but cannot see it
being adopted enough to make it worthwhile for senders.

~~~
buro9
It's quite a nice solution... as you can believe that the text part is
formatted reasonably well enough that you _could_ present it as the text/plain
part to external systems, and yet you know that you can also transform it to
create the text/html part for other systems.

Whilst you only need to store the one part, the text/markdown.

It also gives you the ability to run a sanitizer after the markdown
transformation, so that if you are a webmail host (as they are) you've got
this really nice place to perform sanitization of what will be the email HTML
before you send it to your web page.

------
tehwalrus
LaTeX is given as an example of a markup language alongside HTML.

Is it allowed to be both that and a turing-complete programming language?

~~~
majewsky
I would rather say that (La)TeX is a turing-complete programming language that
includes an extensive typesetting library. :)

------
h43k3r
Is it right now to expect browsers to render markdown file natively?

~~~
slang800
No - this spec is just for defining a media type. I doubt that browsers are
going to touch Markdown anytime soon, given the number of flavors we have
right now. However, you can do it with a plugin:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-
view...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer/)

------
r0muald
There's a typo on page 6: [f0o]

~~~
dsr_
Read the context: that's deliberate.

