My contribution to Markdown
September 2, 2022 at 11:03 AM by Dr. Drang
I was listening to the most recent episode of The Talk Show this morning, and my extremely important contribution to Markdown came up. Sort of.
Rosemary Orchard is the guest, and she does a great job with the single most important task of a Talk Show guest: staying engaged and making relevant contributions while Gruber is on a long digression. Lots of guests find it hard to balance letting Gruber go while also making sure the audience knows you’re still there. Rosemary does this perfectly.
Anyway, it was during a digression—actually a digression within a digression— that Gruber talks about code blocks in Markdown and how one of his favorite features is that you don’t have to escape anything in a code block. You can paste source code directly into your Markdown document without any changes, and it will appear as expected in the rendered HTML.1 That’s my doing.
In 2004, any code that contained backslashes (\) was likely to need some editing when placed in a Markdown code block. Backslashes weren’t treated literally within a code block; they acted as escape characters and made the output look different from the input. Very un-Markdown-ish.
I pointed this out in the Markdown mailing list, and Gruber agreed that it should be changed. In the next Markdown release—which was, I believe, his last—he made the change, and all the text in code blocks has been treated literally ever since.
Undoubtedly, as Markdown became more popular, someone else would have pointed out this problem. Gruber himself would have been annoyed by it if he ever needed to write a code block with backslashes in it. But I was there first. And you’re welcome.
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The code block has to be indented, of course, or—in many implementations, but not Gruber’s—surrounded by fences. ↩
