Elegant Markdown for a more civilized age

Wow, what a crazy idea. Decoupling parsing from output generation. What will those crazy Ruby kids think of next?

I recently wrote something just like this for Node.js:<p><a href="https://github.com/joehewitt/markdom" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joehewitt/markdom</a><p>It's used on <a href="http://uponahill.com" rel="nofollow">http://uponahill.com</a> to extract Flickr urls so I can query the Flickr API and get complete metadata about each photo. My gf, who does most of the writing/photography on the site, has found writing in Markdown and copy/pasting Flickr urls a pretty frictionless experience compared to the Wordpress CMS.

At a certain point, isn't it easier to just write the HTML?

Is there any consensus on an improved/extended Markdown? Between MultiMarkdown, Github Flavored Markdown, Stack Exchange's additions, this new "elegant" markdown and others there seems to be bit of fragmentation in this idea of a simple markup.

Just curious if there was a reason why this is not on the official Github blog?

Speaking of Markdown and Github, has anyone figured out a way to preview locally - with accuracy - how README.mdown files will look on the project page? Would Redcarpet 2 help solve this problem?

Nice. I like the idea with the renderers. I'm going to this idea a try too for my Python binding.

Redcarpet is great, but for code highlighting you can use pygments.rb, which has an embedded python in it and is therefore faster than albino.<p>Check it out: <a href="https://github.com/tmm1/pygments.rb" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/tmm1/pygments.rb</a>

Am I the only one that found the font on that page distracting?

excellent. Maybe now there well be an elegant way to go from .markdown to .docx

Someone shall port this to Python (and possibly PHP).