Markdown parsing is brittle

conversionfoundry / breeze

A Ruby on Rails CMS for brochure-style websites.

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Markdown parsing is brittle #26

Open ShaneNZ opened 11 years ago

ShaneNZ commented 11 years ago

Observed on Leftclick site (Breeze version?)

Parsing of the markdown when creating content is somewhat brittle, especially with respect to whitespace. For example:

a blank line prior to the first item of a list (numbered or bulleted) seems to be required? C
spaces are required on each line for a numbered list before the list counter, but not for a bulleted list
strong/italic needs surrounding whitespace; you cannot emphasise part of a word i.e abcdefghi does not work
leading whitespace on a heading line breaks the heading
placing a markdown list inside <div class="myclass"> ... </div> doesn't work (maybe it shouldn't?)

isaacfreeman commented 11 years ago

Markdown support is provided by Marquess (https://github.com/fauxparse/marquess), which is a jQuery widget Matt Powell (fauxparse on Github) wrote specifically for the purpose. It supports only a subset of Markdown, and hasn't been updated for a couple of years.

I'd suggest that we switch to some other third-party widget for Markdown support, rather than maintaining Marquess.

ShaneNZ commented 11 years ago

Agreed. Had a quick look around, found a couple of options that look OK on the face of it, left here for future reference:

http://pushingkarma.com/projects/jquery-wysiwym/ http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/examples/markdown/ http://ajaxorg.github.com/ace/build/kitchen-sink.html http://blog.aisleten.com/2008/09/11/rails-textile-and-javascript-wysiwyg-roundup/(comparison article for different WYSIWYM editors, textile focused but includes (a bias against) markdown :)

Some of these support Textile as well - I have no preference, and transitioning would be a pain for existing sites, but there might be tech/strategic reasons why it makes sense (haven't thought about that).