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Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

fiddle.md

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Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#41

Post by jumpwah »

scrollaway wrote: post #20
halosghost wrote: post #6

These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

No offense and all (I'm a huge python guy) but... why? RST is a pretty god damn awful format. Markdown lacks a proper standard but that's really the only problem with it... I wish the python community would just adopt Markdown for good and stop trying so hard with rst.

> Markdown lacks a proper standard

http://commonmark.org/. Of course, you might already know about this, and just be playing the https://xkcd.com/927/ card.

On that topic, does anyone know what flavour of markdown is being used here (in fiddle.md)?

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#42

Post by ggordan »

xomateix wrote: post #23

I've played a bit and it looks really interesting. I see you currently support saving the fiddles to dropbox. Do you plan to add other storage systems? I'm thinking it would be great to use that along with github to write documentation or even websites using jekyll.

Thanks for the feedback! We started with Dropbox because that is what we all use, but we do want to add support for other services. Your idea for GitHub integration is very interesting, and it's not something that previously occurred to us. It's something we'll definitely look into!

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#43

Post by ronjouch »

xfalcox wrote: post #11

I was thinking with this idea for some time and the killers features for me are: - Allow custom CSS - Post a json with the markdown content to a custom URL Do you plan to open source it?

For custom CSS, a user-level workaround for now could be to style the domain with your userContent.css (Firefox) or the Stylish extension (Firefox, Chrome).

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#44

Post by pimpl »

jumpwah wrote: post #41
scrollaway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense and all (I'm a huge python guy) but... why? RST is a pretty god damn awful format. Markdown lacks a proper standard but that's really the only problem with it... I wish the python community would just adopt Markdown for good and stop trying so hard with rst.

> Markdown lacks a proper standard http://commonmark.org/ . Of course, you might already know about this, and just be playing the https://xkcd.com/927/ card. On that topic, does anyone know what flavour of markdown is being used here (in fiddle.md)?

We use marked - https://github.com/chjj/marked - with some slight modifications.

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#46

Post by pimpl »

freshyill wrote: post #35
ryannevius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTML generated correctly, but the actual table didn't render at all in the preview for me. Text was aligned...sort of, but there was zero white space, and no dividers. Maybe it's simply my rusty MD skills.

I think it just needs some CSS love. Switch to HTML and you can definitely see it's putting out a table—it's just not a very pretty table.

Yeah, we need to add some styles for tables. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#47

Post by williamstein »

scrollaway wrote: post #39
williamstein wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've wondered about the same question, and I also personally greatly prefer markdown. I got into Python in 2002, and my recollection is that RST was introduced a few years before Markdown. Thus RST was more mature than Markdown at the time when Python documentation was a disaster zone and people were looking around for technology on which to build Sphinx. So I think RST versus Markdown for Python is more or less a "h…

Yeah you're absolutely right. RST was great when Markdown wasn't around, but Markdown is just better. It's a bit of a toughie, the python community doesn't have much to deal with Markdown itself. pypi expects rst etc. There's also very few tools available in general, which is a huge shame. Part of this is due to different Markdown "flavours". At this point though, Github being the largest provider of Markdown, a safe…

"a safe bet would be to standardize on Github's flavour and call it a day." - yes, definitely. That's precisely what I'm doing in SageMathCloud.

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#48

Post by orliesaurus »

I love MD support, it makes writing things easy and looks polished, therefore I love this!

On top of that I believe It's going to make it onto swipe.to ? I hope so because it would be a a much needed addition tool for editing presentations and rendering it on the fly :D

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#49

Post by halosghost »

scrollaway wrote: post #20
halosghost wrote: post #6

These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

No offense and all (I'm a huge python guy) but... why? RST is a pretty god damn awful format. Markdown lacks a proper standard but that's really the only problem with it... I wish the python community would just adopt Markdown for good and stop trying so hard with rst.

Actually, I completely disagree. Rst can do things that markdown will never be able to do (at least, not any of the common dialects). E.g., you can create your own directives to do special formatting however you'd like. You also have a ton more functionality built-in (e.g., a directive for LaTeX-style math) that is also incredibly uncommon in markdown.

Furthermore, the document structure in rst is far more powerful (e.g., you choose your heading conventions).

As it turns out, I am not actually a huge fan of python (and there are plenty of problems with rst), but in the comparison between mdown and rst, the only argument I actually see in favor of mdown is that it's more commonly used (though the fact that commonmark has yet to completely take over actually mitigates that a fair bit).

Re: Show HN: Fiddle.md – a collaborative writing tool by Swipe

#50

Post by halosghost »

williamstein wrote: post #22
halosghost wrote: post #6

These types of projects are all really awesome; I just wish they would support RestructuredText.

SageMathCloud ( https://cloud.sagemath.com ) has similar functionality (collaborative editing, preview) and supports restructured text. To try it, create an account, project, and new file that ends in .rst. It renders the rst server-side using rst2html in Linux, so isn't instant (since not in Javascript) -- are there any good rst to html converters written in Javascript? SMC also runs aspell (server side) when the fi…

Just as a quick note for you. Be aware that certain directives in rst can be security risks if you allow them to be run arbitrarily by users. If you haven't already done so, you should probably look into that.

This seems like an interesting service, I will need to take a look at it, thanks!

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