Description

Move from python-markdown to a commonmark compliant markdown parser.

For python:

https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec/wiki/list-of-commonmark-implementations#python

Why

To have standard and compatible markdown instead of weird behavior that must be fixed by dozens of plugins.

Why is CommonMark needed?

John Gruber’s canonical description of Markdown’s syntax does not specify the syntax unambiguously.

Because there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably over the last 10 years. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn’t discovered right away.

There’s no standard test suite for Markdown; MDTest is the closest thing we have. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges.

We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

About python-markdown

• Will never be CommonMark compliant: CommonMark Python-Markdown/markdown#851
• Is rudely accepting only 4 space indentations (no tabs, no 2 spaces): Identation Python-Markdown/markdown#850 / https://python-markdown.github.io/#differences
• python-markdown implement such an unusable markdown syntax they even develop themselves some extension to be able to fix their own default behavior: https://python-markdown.github.io/extensions/
• Themes like the most used mkdocs-material is forced to implement PyMdown Extensions (https://squidfunk.github.io/mkdocs-material/extensions/pymdown/) to be able to have essential features like HTTP auto-link that are core of all markdown parsers.

Disclaimer

This core issue may be closed soon as @waylan is a core developer of python-markdown so he will probably accept to move away from it.