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Thoughts on Markdown

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#81

Post by slightwinder »

akavel wrote: post #69
slightwinder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. It used established syntax, but it didn't start there. There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times. A language is not just some random parts. > You could print out a Markdown document toda…

> There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times. Would you care to share some examples? I'm genuinely interested, while nothing obvious that would fit this description comes to my mind.

AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, textile, org-mode, they all have to some degree such syntax. Or just read old usenet-archives, FAQs and such. It's natural to do it if your aim is to be lightweight and readable. You just happen to use the elements you have at hand. And people did that, wrote all kind of texts and documents in ascii with made-up syntax on the spot, for usenet, e-mail, ftp-servers, etc. It's hard to say that something started here or there, if the path to it is so short.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#82

Post by leephillips »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #29
cprecioso wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using Markdown with pandoc and pandoc-crossref is basically perfect as a substitute of LaTeX. It allows in-line and standalone LaTeX, and citations with crossref.

In my experience this has zero advantage over LaTeX since converting your markdown to formats other than LaTeX will be just as hard as converting from a LaTeX source. It's even harder because you have to deal with an eclectic mix of LaTeX and markdown, and various errors and restrictions in pandoc.

I use the system to write documents that I convert to PDF (through LaTeX), Word, plain text, and HTML, with equations, tables, and internal and external links preserved (citations in plain text turn into footnotes). It works brilliantly, and this would be impossible when starting with LaTeX source. You can embed the target formats directly into the markdown when needed, and have alternative versions for different targets. I do this for things like tables, where I want to directly format them for LaTeX and HTML, rather than rely on Pandoc’s automatic translation. You can write filters¹ that extend Pandoc/markdown to do any processing that you want, so you can create your own syntax with custom translations to any target format.

[1] https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ [This is sort of obsolete now, as you should probably write filters with Lua. But it’s still a good illustration of the possibilities.]

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#83

Post by tannhaeuser »

ihateolives wrote: post #49
open-source-ux wrote: post #5

I agree with a lot in this article. I too have seen 'non-technical' users struggle with Markdown. The popularity of Markdown among developers also reminds me about SSGs (Static Site Generators). Two technologies loved by developers - and no-one else. " For limited use cases, like blog posts of simple rich text with images and links, markdown will get the job done. " I'd argue it's even less suitable than that. Develo…

> Developers never look beyond Markdown when writing documentation or articles and are thus blissly unaware of the much richer writing possibilties of using HTML (which is simple to learn, unlike CSS). HTML is wolf in sheep's clothing though. It's deceptively simple to learn the basics, but the nested nature of it is something that will allow one to shoot their semantical or representational foot off, even before try…

The tag omission/inference rules for

come from SGML, and, as presented in WHATWG's HTML spec, seem arbitrary. But actually what they're saying is that a paragraph is automatically ended on a non-phrasing element. In earlier HTML versions, a definition of flow content was given like this:
where the flow, block, and inline parameter entities expand to strings like a|abbr|... such that they can be used in element declarations as follows:
meaning the content of p can be any phrasing element (and text content), except elements that are in the flow_only category or the figcaption element, capturing precisely HTML5's rules.

While Ian Hickson's initial (HTML5.0) rules were exactly corresponding to those of HTML4.01, later HTML5 revisions (^2) indeed failed to update the prose description for p-terminating elements, for the very reason that those weren't presented as a formal spec (such as a DTD).

In a presentation I held [1] I made exactly that point for the p element, and you might find the derivation of a new SGML DTD grammar for HTML5.x generally of interest.

[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5-dtd-slides-wrapper.html

^2: if WHATWG had bothered to version their specs, and W3C still would produce versioned snapshots of those, at least

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#84

Post by [deleted] »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #47
Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

> We've had a variety of markup formats including HTML, XML, etc. which are relatively a pain to read or write. Right, but Markdown relies on HTML (or whatever other markup it is pre-procesing) for anything difficult. I like Markdown[0] but surely our job as technologists is to find better solutions than a system that requires you to escape asterisks in certain situations, or rely on a preview pane to work out what i…

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#85

Post by irowe »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #40
bayindirh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense. On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspec…

> "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand" I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.

fwiw, I see a lot of papers on IEEE Xplore that are presented as reflowable HTML on the page with the option for a PDF, presumably generated from the same source.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#86

Post by civilized »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #47
Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

> We've had a variety of markup formats including HTML, XML, etc. which are relatively a pain to read or write. Right, but Markdown relies on HTML (or whatever other markup it is pre-procesing) for anything difficult. I like Markdown[0] but surely our job as technologists is to find better solutions than a system that requires you to escape asterisks in certain situations, or rely on a preview pane to work out what i…

Why would we think there is a better solution? There's only so many symbols on the keyboard. There's only so many symbols in ASCII. That's how you end up having to escape things.

An asterisk literal usually belongs inside single or triple backticks IMO, and you won't have to escape it there.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#87

Post by Fnoord »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

Readable is not a proposition, its a spectrum.

The beauty of JSON is that you can convert it to a more readable state. For example, an unjustify would force the correct enters, already improving readability (I still find it unreadable, but OK). Converting it to YAML would, in my opinion, increase the readability even further, but YMMV.

With the binary word processors, we had a vendor lock-in. Never again! If we got open standards, we can convert to/from another document format, including the Markdown language of your choice.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#88

Post by 0thgen »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #47
Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

> We've had a variety of markup formats including HTML, XML, etc. which are relatively a pain to read or write. Right, but Markdown relies on HTML (or whatever other markup it is pre-procesing) for anything difficult. I like Markdown[0] but surely our job as technologists is to find better solutions than a system that requires you to escape asterisks in certain situations, or rely on a preview pane to work out what i…

what's worse: (a) a preview pane, or (b) a bloated editor (msWord) or mysterious web format (google docs)

also, there's many WYSIWYG editors that do an awesome job (Typora, Zettlr, etc)

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#89

Post by AuthorizedCust »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

Huh? Markdown was created in 2004: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown

The tools you invoke, which predate Markdown considerably, and mentioning 1970s don’t make sense in that light.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#90

Post by tonetheman »

thangalin wrote: post #20

KeenWrite[1] is my text editor that takes a slightly different approach than MDX. Rather than include variable definitions within documents, variables are defined in an external file[2]. I find that when variables are embedded into documents, those variables often include controls for presentation logic. To me, any presentation logic meant to affect a plain text document's presentation does not belong in the document…

What you have done is really interesting. You might need to do more smaller chunks of how to use it though.

I watched part of the video and I understood the substitution but the next part just went over my head. Maybe it is like a double pointer.

Anyway your editor and your idea is super interesting. Just needs some explanation. Maybe you have already done that somewhere?

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