````suggestion
This example should instead be:
```basic
10 PRINT "LOL"
20 GOTO 10
```
````CommonMark is a comprehensive specification which also has a reference implementation and a test suite.
I sometimes wonder... is it Markdown's specification chaos the reason for its success? Maybe it was just barely enough spec to be usable but also small enough to allow anyone to make an implementation that seemed right. No qualifications to fail. Thus, it proliferated.
The xkcd[1] problem is a darn shame, though. At least CommonMark exists for people who want to point to a "Standard"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327
I generally like John Gruber and have been a DF reader for years, but I really never understood his perspective on this; I have trouble seeing it as much more than a "worse is better" kind of take.
Loosy goosy is fine for a hobby project but if you do anything with vanilla Markdown beyond simple links, headings and text, you quickly find yourself in a frustrating zone of incompatible hacks and syntax extensions.
But ya, in order to look good in source form, but still handle arbitrary content, they had to add all these little exceptions and corner cases.
An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.
> The details can be found at my website (https://example.com).
The problem with this is that if you want to render this “pretty”, there’s no way to know whether the link should be “my website” or “website” or even the whole sentence. So you add brackets to clarify.
> The details can be found at [my website](https://example.com).
There are certainly alternatives but I don’t think any of them are more natural, or memorable for that matter.
Edit: It took me a re-read to fully understand your comment, I can see how square brackets might be an incremental addition. This may also help remember the syntax, thanks!
For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).
It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1]
[1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.
I always used html elements like <pre /> and <code /> to go around this in the past
All these complications would have been avoidable with a more thought through design/better choices of symbols. For example one could have used brackets:
[[[lang
code here
]]]
[[[html
html code
[[[css
css code
]]]
[[[js
js code
]]]
html code
]]]
In a parser that would be much simpler to parse. It is kind of like parsing S-expressions. There is no need for 4 backticks, 5, or any higher number. I don't want to sit there counting backticks in the document, to know what part of a nested code block some code belongs to. It's a silly design.
The complication doesn't stem from lack of distinct start and end, what you are trying to solve for here, is when you have multiple languages in a single block, and want pretty colors on each. Seeing that HTML doesn't support imbrication of pre tags (or rather doesn't render one embedded in the next), that would probably not work without producing something that is not pure html.
> In a parser that would be much simpler to parse
Parsing a variable number of ` is not more complex than looking ahead for a closing boundary. In fact, once you introduce escaping characters, you need to handle escaping of the escaping character, which is slightly more complex.
Which is quick and easy to understand.
Sometimes you want to paste a large region of code into a code block, and escaping the content is harder than fixing and start and end delimiters. This matters particularly in Markdown, where embedding large regions of code or text is common, whereas other languages you’d put it in its own file.
So I still suggest the ability to change the number of open and close brackets. Then you’ll also need an implicit newline or other way to distinguish content that starts with an open bracket.
The classic way in markdown to insert block of code is to indent the code.
Indenting inline code requires a text editor that makes indentation ergonomic or else extra effort per line; and it doesn't mesh well with lists or block quotes.
Solved it by surrounding code with more ticks than maximum number of consecutive ticks inside its text. This allows arbitrary nesting.
Postgres solves it by using `$something$ whatever $something$` [2].
[1] https://github.com/PratikDeoghare/brashtag [2] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-syntax-lexical.h...
So, the same thing that Markdown does, as described in TFA?
Unfortunately, some markdown implementations don't handle this well. We were looking at using code-fence like syntax in Rust and we were worried about people knowing how to embed it in markdown code fences but bad implementations was the ultimate deal breaker. We switched to `---` instead, making basic cases look like yaml stream separators which are used for frontmatter.
Actually, yes, now you know for a fact that none of the Markdown implementation will render it correctly.
So, I guess, they used `~~~` instead and it was an error in OP post.
blah
#+END_SRC
org-mode to the rescue ;p