Re: [Tools-discuss] [rfc-i] Recommendation 9 from Results and analysis of the survey of I-D authors on formats and tools

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2021, at 08:31, Eric Rescorla wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 4, 2021 at 1:28 PM John Levine <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > If we're going to adopt markdown, we need at least to decide what we mean by markdown.  I don't
> > have any strong opnions about how to get to that point.
> 
> +1

I think that it depends on what "support" means.  If it means providing support for conversion and upload (and nits and whatever other processes we might choose to support), that's relatively easy.  That can be done with minimal official backing for both formats, not just one (drop .txt at the same time).  I support both mmark and kramdown variants; it costs ~5 lines of code that I last touched years ago.  And both get enough use to justify that code.  They are trivially distinguishable and both formats reduce to XML nicely, for which we can build common tooling.

The support Carsten and Miek provide is excellent, so unless we are forced to choose, I'd say that we don't have to.  If that support were to end and there was a need for the IETF to step in, then we might want to consider resourcing only one of the two, but I'm OK with two until we're forced to choose.

One would be better, but I don't see a need to force a choice.