Edge cases largely don't matter, because again I'm not trying to make a book. I don't care if my table is off by a few pixels. 50% of the time I'm reading markdown it's not even formatted, it's just in raw format in an editor.
If you write Markdown in a way that your engine will misparse, you may well not notice—the compiler probably doesn’t even have the notion of throwing an error. The fact that you’re normally working with the unformatted text makes it even more likely that you won’t notice. (And the complexity is badly encapsulated, too.)
I have seen errors due to Markdown complexity so often. I just dealt with a blog where some images were completely missing because they’d written <img> tags in order to add some class attributes, and the engine didn’t allow raw HTML, and they didn’t notice they were gone (probably because ![]() images were still there). Markdown is so technically unsound it’s sometimes quite distressing.
We’re not talking about a table being off by a few pixels. We’re talking about words being mangled, text disappearing, much more severe stuff. Markdown isn’t even capable of table stuff.
HTML transformation is a bonus on top of that. If we want that we will mandate a specific Markdown engine with a strict parser.
If you only care about reading it raw, you don’t bother with Markdown. Some of what you write will be the same as Markdown, but not all—for example, no one would use its ridiculous link or image syntax.
The reason you write with Markdown syntax is because you want to be able to format it (even if you will normally consume it in plain text yourself). And once you’re using Markdown syntax, you need to know the rules, to a greater or lesser extent. You must be able to parse Markdown syntax mentally. If you don’t know the rules well enough, your mental parse will be incorrect, and you’ll produce errors. Errors that won’t be detected by your computer. That’s the hazard with Markdown compared to C++: your mental parser is buggy and incomplete, but with C++ the computer will generally catch your errors while with Markdown it will never catch your errors.
Really? I was under the impression that the fact that it is miserable to parse C++ directly means that it's also miserable to compile C++ - it can't be done quickly - which is something that everyone has to do all the time.
(And just to be completely clear, I'm not saying that the difficulty of parsing C++ makes it miserable to write a compiler. I'm saying that the difficulty of parsing C++ makes it miserable to run a compiler.)
How so? In Ada, Fortran, C, C++, Java, Python, etc. parsing is one of the many phases of compiling. Far from being orthogonal problems, parsing is a sub-problem of compiling.
