Is compatibility to the RMarkdown format a good idea?

[mb21]

It would be nice to have a common document format for programs/editors/IDEs that call pandoc (or indeed potentially other markdown engines). The format should be extensible, but common things (like whether pandoc should be called with --toc for this specific document) should be standardized.

Jekyll already started this (AFAIK), by introducing the YAML metadata with the title keys, which other programs followed. Since Rmarkdown seems somewhat wide-spread, I thought maybe it's a good idea to picky-pack on that. Even though html_document in rmarkdown files refers to the name of the R function, not the name of the pandoc output format, although the two are of course closely related. From the panrun README:

The idea is to be somewhat compatible with rmarkdown's document format. Therefore you can use, for example, either the html or html_document key (or even pdf_document or slidy_presentation), or either toc-depth or toc_depth, and the value of pandoc_args is also passed on.

(However, as opposed to rmarkdown, panrun doesn't do anything more than passing on the options it finds.)

Question: is this useful to anyone, or does this introduce more confusion, since a lot of rmarkdown-options will be silently ignored?

@yihui, would love to hear your thoughts on this. Btw, what does rmarkdown do with keys it doesn't recognize?