Comments on: MarsEdit Markdown

By: Michel Fortin

Michel Fortin — Mon, 14 May 2007 18:49:42 +0000

“if one instance of Perl can simply have scripts run through it repeatedly, that solves the issue.”

I’m not sure that’s possible in the way you suggest it. What you can do is run a custom-made Perl script that calls the Markdown function for you without ending itself at the end. When you send some input, it convert the text and send back the result… and then wait for the next input before calling again the Markdown function.

I’ve made such a script in PHP for PHP Markdown (about 15 lines of code). I don’t have any C or Objective-C code to go along however. If you’re interested, drop me an email.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:32:15 +0000

Cool Michel, that’s a great idea. I had been wondering whether there was some way to set up a perl “runtime” in memory, but of course if one instance of Perl can simply have scripts run through it repeatedly, that solves the issue.

I will look into this when I next pick up the preview code.

By: Michel Fortin

Michel Fortin — Fri, 11 May 2007 20:36:26 +0000

Now that I think of it, you could probably speed up the live preview by not creating a new Perl process every time and instead having one that runs in background, idle until it recieve new input. I’ve been doing some benchmarking with PHP Markdown and found out that processing most input generally takes less than 15 ms, but starting a new PHP process adds an overhead of about 100 ms (iBook G4; 1.2 Ghz). I believe these two numbers to be slightly higher for Perl.

By: Eduo

Eduo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 18:47:28 +0000

Cool. That probably means I’ll stick with Markdown extra then as I have so far. :)

By: Michel Fortin

Michel Fortin — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 15:15:11 +0000

About “rel” attributes for links, that’s on my todo list for the next version of PHP Markdown Extra, with “class” and possibly other useful standard attributes (“id”, “lang”, “hreflang”, etc.).

I too would like to see things added to the official Markdown syntax. When I first released PHP Markdown Extra, what I had in mind was that features would slowly percolate to regular Markdown (with possible modifications) while the Extra version could keep an edge. It turns out that John Gruber’s Markdown hasn’t been updated much since then, even for bug fixes. That means PHP Markdown isn’t evolving much either on the syntax side, although I’ve fixed many bugs since the last release of John’s Markdown, and changed the architecture to help build extensions on the top of it.

About creating an Objective-C version, that sounds like an interesting project. I’m pretty sure I could do it, but it would take a lot of time, time I prefer to spend elsewhere at the moment.

By: eduo

eduo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 08:15:22 +0000

Jochen: Y personally wouldn’t mind seeing a new version of markdown (officially sanctioned by Gruber) with those additions and allowances for some extended markup or an official path of extensions at least.

As it stands, where I write I have a need to specify “rel=” attributes in some links, as well as other extended attributes and specific classes from time to time.

I know the idea of Markdown is to avoid this, and I currently do this including it in html blocks that are then ignored.

I still think it would be nice to have the ability to do it all in markdown.

By: Jochen Wolters

Jochen Wolters — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 07:41:27 +0000

Markdown is awesome. I have to write "real HTML" for one blog I post to, while allowing myself ;) to use Markdown on my own site, and Markdown is so much more enjoyable to write in because it requires _much_ less effort. I just wish that the extensions that Michel Fortin built into his excellent Markdown Extra plug-in would find their way into John Gruber's "official" implementation.

By: eduo

eduo — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:59:49 +0000

Ryan: You are right. I probably think of Markdown as intuitive because it reminds me the way I used to emphasize, underline, mark as headings, etc. back in 1992 in usenet (I think ETEXT documents use a similar format as well).

To me nowadays it’s almost natural to emphasize using underscores, REALLY emphasize using asterisks, make lists using dashes, mark headings with lines of dashes or equal signs below the heading, etc. That may be the reason I see it as intuitive.

By: Jeff Harrell

Jeff Harrell — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:26:31 +0000

You can mix Markdown and HTML, easily. The specifics vary depending on whether you’re using the Perl version or the PHP version (Movable Type versus WordPress, in wildly oversimplified blog terms), but in general, Markdown ignores block-level HTML elements. You can mix and match inline HTML elements to your heart’s content — using Markdown syntax to italicize words inside an HTML link, for example — but Markdown ignores everything inside an HTML div or paragraph element.

By: Ryan Ballantyne

Ryan Ballantyne — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 15:23:41 +0000

Hmm…interesting concept. But I’m a control freak when it comes to marking up web content, and I don’t know if I would want to let a tool like Markdown handle it for me.

Unless…can you mix HTML and markdown in one? If I had the ability to drop into HTML for finer control of some elements while letting Markdown handle the ones that aren’t so important, I might see a use for this.