Autodetect key:value as visible metadata

Extensions
1

For things like

 Author:     Bane Liciea
 Title:      Why you should hire me
 Date:       32-4-2002
 Layout:     Resume

It really should be easy to see that this should not be rendered as

Author: Bane Liciea Title: Why you should hire me Date: 32-4-2002 Layout: Resume

but rather it should be treated as if there is a
at the start of each key:value pair

Just autodetect that a few words plus : indicate that there should be a line break at the start of that sentence.

Weirder examples:

e.g.

 Author:     Bane 
  Liciea
 Title:      Why you should 
  hire me
 Date:       32-4-2002
 Layout:     Resume

or

 Author:
   Bane Liciea
 Title:
   Why you should hire me
 Date:       
   32-4-2002
 Layout:
   Resume

Should be smart enough to know that it should be seen as:

 Author:     Bane Liciea
 Title:      Why you should hire me
 Date:       32-4-2002
 Layout:     Resume
2

Btw, does it mean anything that I often do single line description like this?

Dog :~ An animal with two legs

edit: Hmmm… it’s more for http://talk.commonmark.org/t/description-list/

3

Well, if you have line breaks set to render as <br>, you’d get what you expect:

 Author:     Bane Liciea
 Title:      Why you should hire me
 Date:       32-4-2002
 Layout:     Resume
4

Well there is argument in this thread that linebreaks <br> shouldn’t be automatically added.

There is the start | signifier for indicating proses/<br> should be treated differently in discussion. But in the context of key:value, it’s much better to not have to use start | or end \ signifier.

5

Still, alignment would be off for the key-value pairs.

Perhaps this is another call for table layout extensions later?

That seems a lot less dangerous than trying to infer key-value pairs based on colons and short leading words.

3 Likes
6

Note the section of the spec on soft line breaks states:

A renderer may also provide an option to render soft line breaks as hard line breaks.

This would likely be applied in the user’s settings or as a setting for the entire app. But the default in CommonMark is still soft line breaks, consistent with the Daring Fireball spec.

7

Archie Markup Language (from the New York Times labs) is “a structured text format optimized for human writability”, which does this: get key: value pairs from a document in natural language (formatted e.g. in Common Mark).

It would be interesting to add similar behavior to Common Mark: tokenize strings that conform to the rules defined in ArchieML, write the keys+values as metadata to the AST (in addition to any present YAML front- and/or back-matter), and render these strings differently from ordinary paragraphs (i.e. insert linebreaks automatically, etc.).

1 Like