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Comment by woodruffw | Hacker News Reader

> Handle the math sections first and make math support opt-in.

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean, this isn't possible in a backwards-compatible manner: It's perfectly reasonable for pre-existing Markdown to have content like "Bob pays $1 for bananas, Susan pays $2," which would mis-render a normal sentence as if it had inline math content.

The blog post author's proposal is the most reasonable one: it's both backwards-compatible (the triple-tick "math" group was not already defined or, if it was, a new unique identifier could be used) and doesn't produce any ambiguities with other parts of the Markdown grammar or non-semantic text. Finally, it avoids parser composition, which is a source of all kinds of nasty differential bugs.

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> which would mis-render a normal sentence as if it had inline math content

Not if it's opt-in. If you opt in to math support, you use \$, but that's a choice you make. Also, you can force an opt-in to use dollar signs vs \[ and \(.

> The blog post author's proposal is the most reasonable one

I gave the problem with that. It's not standard syntax, so markdown parsers like Pandoc stop working. And technically, that doesn't even fix anything, because someone could have been using that syntax already. It might not be common, but it isn't a foolproof fix.

> Not if it's opt-in. If you opt in to math support, you use \$, but that's a choice you make. Also, you can force an opt-in to use dollar signs vs \[ and \(.

How would you make it opt-in? With a pragma at the beginning of the markdown file? I don't mean that as a rhetorical question; good UX for these kinds of things is hard.

> I gave the problem with that. It's not standard syntax, so markdown parsers like Pandoc stop working. And technically, that doesn't even fix anything, because someone could have been using that syntax already. It might not be common, but it isn't a foolproof fix.

I think the cat is already well out of the bag with that: GitHub has supported triple-tick with the "geojson" and "topojson" tags for quite some time, choosing to render them as maps[1].

Renderers like Pandoc will handle the above gracefully by degrading to a code block, which is perfectly reasonable until they support it directly. In any case, there's precedent for it.

Edit: And it looks like they do support "```math" anyways[2]. It's just not well documented, and doesn't have an inline counterpart.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

[2]: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

The “opt-in” would make it backwards-compatible, since any preexisting files would have math support disabled.

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