Requests for comment/Markdown

I plan to work this up into an RFC. For now, I'm just going to take down some thoughts I wrote in an email conversation.

Problem
Here's the landscape of wiki markup: Absent a change in direction in the industry, we anticipate we will need to build in support for complicated library to parse GMail, Word Docs, MediaWiki markup, everything that pandoc supports, Parsoid HTML, and whatever other format claims the "text/html" media type
 * 1) MediaWiki Wikitext is largely relegated to MediaWiki use, due to its complexity from years of evolution.   As far as "standard wiki markup", Markdown has a lot of mindshare.
 * 2) We need better interchange formats for cutting and pasting rich text into VE/Parsoid than the multitude of "text/html compliant" markup out there.

In particular, cutting and pasting text typically involves one of two formats: The text/enriched media type () hasn't been replaced. XXfixme - is RFC 1563 still in widespread use in modern applications?
 * 1) plain text (as described in section 1.1 of )
 * 2) HTML, which includes the horrifying diaspora of complicated "compliant" sources noted above

Markdown
Markdown seems to on track to become a new intermediate text representation for markup. It has widespread support, and there is IETF work occuring to better specify the format ().

Can we evolve our platform to support Markdown as a first class citizen (especially for cutting and pasting)?

Powering ahead with HTML
It will be a while before "text/markdown" has widespread, mainstream use (if it ever does). See T127329 for strategies that deal with the web of today as we know it.

Questions

 * Are there any ArchCom-RFCs for this already?
 * Any code to support this?
 * Should this document evolve into an ArchCom RFC?