… and people wonder why I dislike Markdown. (There are fairly radical rendering differences between the GitHub page and the spacevim.org page, because different Markdown renderers with different bugs have been used, and the Markdown was fairly sloppily written.)
Yes I recognized the markdown fails from my own markdown fails. Especially when you move repos between github and bitbucket, and expect README.md to 'just work', it seldom does. I've gone between md, org and even rst. They are all great, but still suck in curious ways. pandoc helps but it is a whole kettle of fermented fish in itself.
One big hint: leave blank lines between block elements. (It’s the same in reStructuredText, except that it actually complains if you do it incorrectly rather than being silently inconsistent as all Markdown implementations that I know of are.) Not doing that is the main thing that’s wreaking havoc here.
The table rendering issues I suspect are from the lack of a newline after the headers. I don't know whether it's correct or not because, yknow, markdown.
reStructuredText is at least consistent. And extensible. And secure. It has a decent spec, as well. It’s just a pity that it never gained widespread acceptance or other implementations and is thus effectively tied to Python.
I like reStructuredText and work in it regularly. I’m sad that Markdown with all its terrible inconsistency, lack of extensibility, insecurity, &c. has prevailed.
The reasons why Markdown is popular are I think very similar to why HTML is popular. In its first years, it was loosely specced, very liberal in what it accepted and was parsed differently by different implementations (browsers).
When this actually became a real problem, HTML5 came out to spec it much more rigorously.
RST in that picture is XHTML. Rigorous spec, but very picky with the input. Typo? Your whole document won't render.
I've been bitten by XHTML and I've been bitten by RST. The experiences are very similar. I agree with the need for a more rigorous spec but like with HTML it still needs to be liberal with its input.
So that's what we need, and I just hope it doesn't take years to come into existence. An HTML5 for markdown. And we shall call it MD5!
