I use markdown for writing blog posts, and I need arbitrary HTML all the time. For tables; or for custom syntax highlighting; for drop-down menus that let readers choose what PL they want to see examples in (http://www.rntz.net/post/2016-06-06-not-everything-is-an-exp... ); to put the numbers on section headings into the left-margin; etc, etc.
Basically, markdown has (at least) two use-cases:
1. A safe (if you do HTML sanitization properly) way to let people mark-up their input on web comment sites like HN, StackOverflow, etc. This is probably the most common use-case.
2. A web authoring tool. This was the intended use-case.
Supporting arbitrary HTML is absolutely inadmissible for (1); not having arbitrary HTML is basically inexcusable for (2). And yeah, I could write the posts in straight HTML, but honestly that's a pain. Why shouldn't there be a tool that makes writing styled-text-with-lists-and-headings easy but lets me drop down to HTML when I need to?
Because intermixing Markdown and HTML is ambiguous, and if you're authoring HTML, you clearly know HTML already?
I'm not actually sure I believe this yet. But I think I'd see a lot more use case for something that lets me do a very tiny amount of things, maybe just headings and bold and italic, and avoids not only ambiguity but any risk of ambiguity.
Are you saying you shouldn't use HTML with markdown? Markdown was explicitly designed not to cover each and everything HTML, and so that you could fallback to HTML; it's kind of the entire point of markdown (or have I misunderstood you?).
> But I think I'd see a lot more use case for something that lets me do a very tiny amount of things, maybe just headings and bold and italic, and avoids not only ambiguity but any risk of ambiguity.
When you build that, let me know. Until then I'll be over here, using a Perl script from 2004 that still works just fine.
There's an easy compromise between (1) and (2): configurable bleaching.
I also use markdown for writing blog posts, and have a lot of the same pain points. I have been working on an extended version of markdown (https://github.com/alexbecker/blogdown) to fix this.
Basically, markdown has (at least) two use-cases:
1. A safe (if you do HTML sanitization properly) way to let people mark-up their input on web comment sites like HN, StackOverflow, etc. This is probably the most common use-case.
2. A web authoring tool. This was the intended use-case.
Supporting arbitrary HTML is absolutely inadmissible for (1); not having arbitrary HTML is basically inexcusable for (2). And yeah, I could write the posts in straight HTML, but honestly that's a pain. Why shouldn't there be a tool that makes writing styled-text-with-lists-and-headings easy but lets me drop down to HTML when I need to?