Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

Something that isn’t clear to me from this spec http://textbundle.org/spec/ is the exact format of Markdown that should be used here.

I was under the impression that the Gruber original at https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ wasn’t well enough specified (unless you want to treat a 20 year old Perl script as a specification) to be interoperable - hence efforts like https://commonmark.org/

View on HN

There's a "type" field in the spec, defined as: "The UTI of the text.* file. E.g. set to net.daringfireball.markdown for Markdown. This field should default to net.daringfireball.markdown to be backwards-compatible with version 1."

So it's whatever you care to specify. Doesn't have to be Markdown at all. It looks like it'd be completely valid to use this as a way to bundle up a webpage with all associated images and scripts, for instance.

But what does "net.daringfireball.markdown" mean? Does it mean "parse it using the 1.0.1 Perl script from 2004 on https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ "?

It just means "the description written by Gruber at his domain." The Perl script is just a convenience (if one can call Perl convenient...) for the curious.

Anyone else's flavor of Markdown can be used by specifying its identifier, e.g. "com.github.markdown.v3" (I made that up, it's not a real thing AFAIK)

I don’t think the Gruber definition is specific enough for a spec like TextBundle that’s meant to be interoperable between different applications.

Perhaps. But since TextBundle lets one specify the content type, you can always choose one that better suits your purposes.

It seems fine to me. If your app is using weird edge cases of markdown syntax, or extensions, it should probably specify a different UTI. If you’re pretty much just doing the level of markdown in the average rich-notes app, that’s pretty interoperable.

It’s any text based format, you specify the type in info.json

Reply on news.ycombinator.com