These are issues I noticed while reading through the spec. Most of them are pretty minor and, I hope, uncontroversial; some of them are only issues with the presentation of the spec rather than bugs in the spec itself. They’re in the order I noticed them.
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Consistent with the default behavior of CSS/HTML and the original ASCII specification, tab stops should be 8 spaces apart, not 4 spaces. (More precisely, tab expansion should insert however many spaces are required to make the number of characters so far on the current line be a multiple of 8.) This may also mean reverting to the original Markdown rule of “four spaces OR one tab” to set off a code chunk.
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The
<tag />
notation is a hangover from XML and should not appear in new HTML; therefore, please do not use it in equivalent-HTML examples either (for instance,<hr>
, not<hr />
. -
In several places, trailing whitespace is discussed. However, trailing whitespace is invisible in examples. The style sheet for the specification should be adjusted so that trailing whitespace is visible (drawn in a slightly darker color, perhaps).
-
An indented code block inside a quote block should require only four spaces (or a hard tab) after the
>
if the space after>
has been omitted on preceding lines:>quoted text > > code inside quoted text >1234
This is ambiguous only if the code is the first line of the quote block, in which case the five-space rule is fine. (This all enhances consistency with the rules for list items, below.)
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As a special case, code spans consisting entirely of whitespace (e.g.
` `
) should be reduced to a single space character,<code> </code>
, rather than to nothing at all. (Given the syntax, we have to choose between allowing authors to write a code span that is a single space character, or a code span that is completely empty. The former is more useful.)