[英文] 为什么 Markdown 烂

原文：

Why Markdown Sucks by Joe Armstrong （Armstrong 爷爷是 Erlang 语言的设计者之一）

http://joearms.github.io/2016/03/21/Why-Markdown-Sucks.html

摘录：

“ There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” – Bjarne Stroustrup

I discovered that about a third of my old blog entries were incorrectly formatted...

Editing my old pages is more difficult than it seems, since neither the old dialect of markdown rdiscount nor the new kramdown have a formal grammar and I haven ’ t a clue what output they will produce, since it is not formally specified.

I am reluctant to say this, but there is a future proof way of making markdown - that ’ s to write documents directly in XML with a strict DTD and then generate markdown from the XML...

For high quality text, I choose XML markup with my own custom DTD, then an Erlang program to transform this to XSL-FO using an Apache FOP backend.

For low-quality text (like blogs) and emails, markdown is fine - but please don ’ t change the formatting rules after you ’ ve written dozens of large documents.