Philosophy on 'other constructs' (such as tables)

[vyp]

For the most part, I have limited myself to the basic elements described in Gruber's canonical syntax description, eschewing extensions like footnotes and definition lists. It is important to get the core right before considering such things.

And from the introduction, 1.1:

By 2014 there were dozens of implementations in many languages. Some of them extended basic markdown syntax with conventions for footnotes, definition lists, tables, and other constructs, and some allowed output not just in HTML but in LaTeX and many other formats.

Forgive me as I have not found other specific references here to such extended markdown implementations and stmd's relationship to them (pandoc extended markdown, multimarkdown or github flavoured markdown being the most compelling examples). I understand you have chosen to limit stmd to the basic elements in Gruber's originally defined syntax, which is understandable of course as it is being called a standard. However, anticipating a large demand for standardizing extended constructs such as tables or equations (for example, from those who already have many pandoc markdown documents utilizing such elements), does stmd see itself integrating such features some day in the future, or is that against the ideals of this project?

Will it allow meta/header content at the start of the file like in pandoc's extended markdown? Will it be compatible with pandoc's extended markdown (seeing as though you created pandoc and that stmd requires pandoc to build html/pdf versions of the spec)?

Again, sorry if you've already mentioned this somewhere as I haven't found it in my searches.

[vyp]

Seems as though I should have just waited and searched a bit more. Found that discussion is being held at http://talk.standardmarkdown.com/t/the-inevitable-markdownextra-topic/42 for anyone else interested.

Quoting @jgm:

Extensions can come later. This project has the limited goal of standardizing "core" markdown features. There's plenty to worry about there before we go to extensions.