Closed andrewheiss closed 14 years ago
Since footnotes can contain multiple lines/paragraphs, they need to be separated by blank lines. This is consistent with the behavior of default Markdown for other "paragraph" type elements (lists, blockquotes, etc).
Without a lot of convincing, I don't expect that this will change.
I'm not sure if this is a feature or a bug…
When using links in reference-style, list mode, each link only needs to be separated by one newline, like so:
However, when using footnotes, which follow a similar markup pattern, each footnote needs to be separated by a blank line, otherwise all footnotes are grouped together in the same note when converted to HTML. For example, in this paragraph
This reference list fails and includes both the second footnote and the third link in the text of the first:
Where as this doesn't fail and works correctly:
I understand that footnotes are a special case (that don't actually exist in real HTML), and that you can expectedly have multiple paragraphs or other HTML elements in a footnote definition (while you can only have a URL and an optional title in link definitions)
Would it be possible in the footnote parsing functions, though, to remove the need for the newlines, perhaps by checking for a
[^x]:
, since it shouldn't be possible to include a footnote inside a footnote. It would make the reference-style footnotes act more like the reference-style links and save a lot of unnecessary whitespace.