I know I’m treading into dangerous waters here, both because this is my first post and because I’m resurrecting a 2 year old thread, but here I go…
Could a solution to the highlighter issue simply leverage the existing link notation with a special case, like this:
Markdown:
Some text, of which only [a portion will be highlighted](# "Take a note at the same time"), along with a note.
Rendered:
Some text, of which only [a portion will be highlighted](# "Take a note at the same time"), along with a note.
This would allow the user to annotate with a highlight and include a note at the same time. It has the added advantage of being backwards compatible with standard link markup, so non-compliant renderers wouldn’t choke on it or show the raw markup, they would simply render it as a link – just like it is here.
The thing to work out is what the anchor should be. If it was [text](mailto:author@example.com "Notes") then the author would be clear; but this would clobber real mailto: links. Perhaps [text](#author@example.com "Notes") would be better?
Just some thoughts. I would love to see some kind of annotation support in Markdown; if it were backward compatible, I think it might stand a better chance of wider acceptance.