Obscurity.Wiki

📎 Analyzing the true essense of markdown

I’m mapping the problem incorrectly - maybe I should try to solve the problem as for what it is: a parsing problem.

Or maybe I just need to change it to be word based and have very specific definitions of the elements needed to solve this problem like recursivity.

Answer the following:

  • What's the strict formal definition of MD? as a parser would do
  • What concepts are needed for that?
  • How does this compare to the ambiguous approach based on words and other ideas?
  • Which one is more flexible, useful, practical, resource heavy? How do they compare?
  • The reading order is from left to right and top to bottom.
  • Each line in a text file represents a unit for markdown.
  • Each line represents an HTML string.
  • Each line is made up of characters.
  • There is a special type of characters that are evaluated when they appear in the first column of a line.
  • There is a second type of special characters that represent an HTML string that are evaluated in non-code lines.
    • 2nd type of chars are evaluated to see if they are non-code or not.
  • The non-code state needs to be determined first and based on the borders.

There are two questions we can ask: "Does this text looks like markdown?" and "Is this valid markdown?" This means there is a quick rough top-down look at it, a range of reach of each special feature/character, and a slow step-by-step read process.

The step-by-step process can feed an overall map or image. The top-down can also roughly contribute to that map.

For the top-down: There is a sensation of closeness between perceived features. Consider the following example where we can perceive that the * special char being close to each other and thus recognizing that this could be a bold text.

------- ------- ------ -----
---- --- **----** ---- - ---
------- ------- ------ -----

In the same way, I'm guessing that there could be a similar approach to recognizing other attributes of the markdown problem such as the beginning and end (top-left to bottom-right corners). Acquiring valuable information in the first glance before spending resources reading line by line could be a huge performance optimization.

See 🔩 Fast-thinking.

I'm starting to feel like the relationship between a finite definition of markdown and the abstract ideas of reading text are starting to overlap. Meaning that my initial problem of not knowing if I should focus on the abstract or the finite is actually a false dichotomy.