[Haskell-cafe] GSoC Project Proposal: Markdown support for Haddock

[Simon Heath]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Kim-Ee Yeoh <ky3 at atamo.com> wrote:
> Could you say something about /why/ you make the suggestion? I, for
> one, would be happy to google and read links, but what's missing from
> that experience would be input from a fellow haskeller. In context. In
> real-time. On topic.

Pretty much the same reasons Richard O'Keefe has already said more
vigorously: Markdown is ambiguous, and thus difficult to write good parsers
for, and that makes it hard to write good text that does exactly what you
want without struggling and clawing at it and eventually just using some
dirty hack workaround you found on Google.  Or changing your document's
contents to handle a formatting bug/misdesign.

People may say "well Markdown has won", in which case Markdown _has_ won.
But there are still plenty of good alternatives out there that are widely
used (RST is just my personal favorite).  And there since there are good
alternatives out there which don't have these problems, why not use them 
instead?

I didn't really want to start a markup-language-flame-war... except that I'm
glad that people are discussing it and thinking about these issues...
So maybe I did.  :-(

Simon