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Thoughts on Markdown

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#91

Post by 0thgen »

dmje wrote: post #8

I've said it so many times my throat is sore but here goes again... As with literally everything, it depends. Markdown is lovely for tech documentation, notes and journaling. It's simple and beautiful and mostly independent of layout. Want to author something rich and expressive which has a modern web audience in front of it (either end user or editor) and it's probably not the right tool. I work with large numbers o…

I see this drive often: find the one true universal format, that can both provide documentation, while also providing an interactive 3D experience for a racing game, equipped with an internal web browser that also lets you listen to the radio

I think we just have to be okay with having to learn multiple formats in our lifetime; I don't see a way around it

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#92

Post by geerlingguy »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #89
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.

I think the point may have been more that conventions like asterisks or dashes for bulleted lists, angle brackets for quoting, etc. were already heavily used conventions predating markdown, the specification.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#93

Post by eadmund »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #89
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.

You write:

> Huh? Markdown was created in 2004 …

Did you read OP?

> > It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML.

Markdown is a formalisation of conventions which were in common in email & news long before HTML even existed.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#94

Post by 0thgen »

cprecioso wrote: post #21
periheli0n wrote: post #17

The discussion reminds me a little of the one around LaTeX in the scientific community. Latex is extremely powerful but reading the raw source of a text is a pain. WISYWIG is just so much more comfortable when writing, but MS Word sucks in its own specific and manifold ways (as does LibreOffice). HTML is still not nice to read, too much boilerplate tags required. Markdown source however is mostly well-readable in a p…

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.

Pandoc completely solves any of the issues mentioned about markdown for scientific writing.

it works flawlessly, and it unarguably way cleaner than writing in plain latex

How can anyone

- tell me

- that this

- list

Is harder to read:

\begin{itemize}

  \item than this

  \item unintuitive

  \item mess
\end{itemize}

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#95

Post by llimllib »

One minor note: jekyll definitely was not first to introduce front matter (though they may have introduced yaml front matter?).

I am sure that at least pyblosxom had it earlier: https://pyblosxom.github.io/Documentation/1.5/writing_entrie...

Here's the earliest surviving commit showing blog entry front matter in 2002: https://github.com/pyblosxom/pyblosxom/blob/f80cdb42eb37ee0e...

My recollection is that blosxom (a perl blogging engine) had front matter as well, but I can't find any evidence of it.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#96

Post by eadmund »

DocTomoe wrote: post #2

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good. Then "modern content creators" did not "want to learn syntax", created "tools that edited and rendered HTML differently and inconsistently", added hundreds of unnecessary tags in it, then started to get smart about "semantic information" and introduced HTML-5-style tags like , which too few people use... Te…

> In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good.

No, it's really not. It is excessively verbose for human usage, and too loose for computer usage. It's a hack.

For human usage, Markdown is pretty decent. For computer usage, an S-expression–based HTML would have been preferable:

    (html
     (head (title "Hello world!")
           (meta ((http-equiv content-type)
           (content text/html)
           (charset utf-8))))
     (body ((bgcolor white))
           (h1 "Hello world!")
           (p "This is my first webpage.")))

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#97

Post by gerikson »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #63
gerikson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Gemini, its format is even more limited than Markdown, and it's TLS-native unlike Gopher. Gopher might have won if students had ~/public_gopher directories, but it was not to be...

Gopher would not and could not have won, for two very good reasons: (Would not) -- it was more complex to implement, being stateful (and it lacked the markup flexibility of HTML, which was kind of a big draw) (Could not) -- the University of Minnesota announced their intention to collect licensing fees on their Gopher server (and client, I think), which was invented there. This was a key moment in the web's developme…

Thanks a lot for expanding. I had no idea IBM was present at the creation, like some spirit of evil ;)

Netscape Navigator handling images was also a Big Deal(tm). Of course, there could have been a graphical (X) gopher client that showed images, but just like the people who like gopher and gemini now dislike images, I suspect it was the same then (think of the bandwidth!)

It's hard to convey how intensely cool it felt to be part of the early web, and images, differently sized and colored fonts were a big part of it.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#98

Post by xlii »

I think author misses the point completely.

Markdown is for writing not for editing. If you want to focus on writing, text, and content instead of on bells and whistles with formatting and typesetting it's really hard to go easier than Markdown.

Sure, Markdown is overused. Probably one shouldn't use it for heavily linked content, where one has to show examples, cross-link, check references, verify the sources etc. and on top of it follow very strict line/page breaking and paragraph rules. But it's not a huge issue, because if the end result is plain text itself one can easily work with pipeline. Text can be easily split, mixed and matched. One can figure out their own content and script it easily assuming they are wanting and tech savvy enough.

Working with text first and then transforming it to LaTeX once the writing process is done is easy. Then you can make semantic adjustments and decide to either output as PDF, process in complex pipeline or plug-in one of the hundreds of solutions that exist today.

It might hold back "editorial" experience but it definitely enables "authoring" experience.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#99

Post by periheli0n »

bayindirh wrote: post #71
periheli0n wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML. YES! It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes. PDFs were great to read when I was still printing papers. For reading on screen they are quite inconvenient. Many publishers have come around in…

> It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes. It's not about LaTeX per se. You can typeset EPUBs with it too, if you want. So reflow ability is not a shortcoming of LaTeX. Publishers send you a Word or LaTeX template, and require your manuscript as a PDF, conforming to that template.…

> You can typeset EPUBs with it too, if you want.

In theory, yes. In practice, this only works when the document is using a restricted set of packages. I tried.

I'm fighting not so much with LaTeX, rather with ArXiv. They have the sources of LaTeX submissions, but do not provide other formats than PDF by default. Judging from my own experience in converting LaTeX to HTML, epub, etc., I assume these conversions simply create too much headache.

> reading a 25 page manuscript is not very efficient on a screen, at least in my discipline

The vast majority of papers I "read" I never read back-to-back, rather than Abstract - Discussion - Results - Introduction - Methods, bailing out at any of those points when I have the information I was looking for. I couldn't possibly keep up with the literature when reading every interesting paper completely.

Those that are really relevant to my research I will read in detail, and at that point a PDF is useful, I agree. But before that, I prefer reflown text & figures.

There was some innovation in that regard, e.g. eLife's Lens, that was specifically designed to support reading on a (large) screen. IEEE also has a good system that works on phones (well, almost; so UI elements clutter the text).

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#100

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #89
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.

Anecdotal, but I was using many of the same formatting conventions on early IM and message board platforms in the late 90s/early 00s, even when they didn't actually do any formatting in the program. That's long before the introduction of Markdown. Markdown was an attempt to take all of those community-accepted formatting conventions and standardize it into a single format. If I still had access to any of my messages from those plaintext messaging days and fed them through a Markdown renderer, they would look remarkably similar to what I had meant to say at the time.

Anecdotal to the second degree: my mom saw me typing in the format at the time and remarked that she had learned to use similar formatting when she learned the typewriter in the 70s (coincidentally, she taught me to type on that very same typewriter).

Is it identical to what it was in the 70s? I don't know for sure, but I doubt it. Is it similar enough that someone versed in Markdown can read the 70s typewriter formats and vice versa? Most likely.

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