torspec/proposals/314-allow-markdown-proposals.md

Filename: 314-allow-markdown-proposals.md
Title: Allow Markdown for proposal format.
Author: Nick Mathewson
Created: 23 April 2020
Status: Finished

Introduction

This document proposes a change in our proposal format: to allow Markdown.

Motivation

Many people, particularly researchers, have found it difficult to write text in the format that we prefer. Moreover, we have often wanted to add more formatting in proposals, and found it nontrivial to do so.

Markdown is an emerging "standard" (albeit not actually a standardized one), and we're using it in several other places. It seems like a natural fit for our purposes here.

Details

We should pick a particular Markdown dialect. "CommonMark" seems like a good choice, since it's the basis of what github and gitlab use.

We should also pick a particular tool to use for validating Markdown proposals.

We should continue to allow text proposals.

We should continue to require headers for our proposals, and do so using the format at the head of this document: wrapping the headers inside triple backticks.