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Thoughts on Markdown

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#111

Post by masklinn »

slightwinder wrote: post #81
akavel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

More generally, markdown is but one (if the most successful) of the “lightweight markup languages” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language).

Most of them have fallen into disuse following the ascendency of markdown, but anyone who was on the internet in the mid-aughts will remember textile and creole, they were major contenders in the CMS and wiki space respectively (IIRC).

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#112

Post by rhn_mk1 »

bluenose69 wrote: post #52
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Most journals I read offer both reflowable HTML and PDF. I don't know anybody who prefers the former. A PDF (and the paper copy it generates) is more convenient for markup, and for memory. I can look at papers I read decades ago, and know where to go to find things, because of what I might call positional memory. Somehow, my brain has information such as "The key Figure is at top of third page" or "that equation I th…

Flowed text doesn't mean that it won't be printed. It means that it could be printed the way you want it, not the way the author wanted.

This comes in handy when the author decided that 50% of the surface of paper should remain blank, or using a tiny font. They may find it helpful, others not. Same goes for the decision to have pages at all.

The only aspect where I see in which someone else making an unappealable decision for you is superior, is convenience. Conditional on that other person being an expert in the field [of printing].

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#113

Post by lpointal »

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.

DocBook…

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#114

Post by throwaway_Aef8 »

ivolimmen wrote: post #13

As a developer that really likes to document stuff I don't like markdown. It's limited and as the article states too fragmented. I started using AsciiDoc a while back. It's like markdown but with more advanced options for true documentation stuff like charts, tables (formatted!), diagrams and more.

For the "more advanced options for true documentation stuff like charts, tables (formatted!), diagrams and more." you might like Obisidian.

But that steers you back towards markdown. How deeply do you not like markdown?

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#115

Post by fjorde »

andrewingram wrote: post #78
fjorde wrote: post #41

appreciate a lot of the points made in the post but ``` distinct( *["code" in body[]._type] .body[_type == "code"] .language ) ``` is "trivial" for no human being

Your content editors would never write that. But if they asked for a feature where you can filter content by programming languages, GROQ would allow your engineers to build it very quickly. I think it was probably a mistake for the article to go into GROQ, but the essence of the point is that content as structured data means content is queryable.

grep -rE '```\w+' |uniq seems like the same query across text files to me. it's not "trivial" but at least grep has a man page and people have used it reliably for decades now. Spinning up whatever it takes to get groq going is not the same thing as having widely available tools that just work.

Somehow structuring content in json is a new idea? There are a lot of html to json parsers out there already. jq and grep can do everything his post suggests and require no less or more investment from a dev perspective.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#116

Post by akavel »

slightwinder wrote: post #81
akavel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tha…

Ah, I thought we're talking typewriter-old times. Yes, sure, I do remember the proliferation of weird wiki syntaxes, and I also remember seeing markdown as a breath of fresh air in its readability and intuitiveness. I do believe the same as the poster before me, that markdown is the closest among them to what could be seen either in typewriting, or on usenet. Asciidoc and rst have some of it, but break the illusion by introducing too much weirdness (see esp. the syntax for links and lists in both of them). Until proven otherwise, I can't believe those happening on usenet and not being ridiculed.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#117

Post by cycomanic »

akavel wrote: post #116
slightwinder wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Ah, I thought we're talking typewriter-old times. Yes, sure, I do remember the proliferation of weird wiki syntaxes, and I also remember seeing markdown as a breath of fresh air in its readability and intuitiveness. I do believe the same as the poster before me, that markdown is the closest among them to what could be seen either in typewriting, or on usenet. Asciidoc and rst have some of it, but break the illusion b…

I would argue that rst is much closer to how things were done with typewriters. One example: I can not think of one document written on a typewriter that indicated a heading with #, but just a brief search for typewriter document images will get you ones with "--" underlines as headings. For me that is actually still the biggest difference between rst and Markdown, and I still think underlines look much more like headings, but I also find # much easier to write

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#118

Post by webmaven »

jeltz wrote: post #11
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…

The ideas behind Markdown are much older than HTML5 and all those tags you talk about. Wikipedia with its MediaWiki syntax is from 2001, ReStructuredText is from 2002, Markdown from 2004, HTML5 from 2008. And I am sure you can find way older formats which Wikipedia and ReST used as inspiration.

You missed ASCIIDoc[0] (2002) from your chosen timeframe, but also some much older Lightweight Markup Languages[1] like setext[2] from 1992.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#119

Post by unfocussed_mike »

civilized wrote: post #107
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but then you have to explain to end-users why they need to escape an asterisk, or why they have to have their content on screen twice -- once in source and once in frustratingly flickering preview. Personally I think it is our job as web developers not to encourage this for end users. (Unless those end users are writing a book, in which case, definitely. Markdown as a source for Pandoc is fabulously better tha…

Users can avoid having to escape the asterisk by using Microsoft Word. It seems to me that you expect some perfect solution to exist, and it is this solution that technologists should make it their mission to find. I think there is no perfect solution and we should navigate the trade-offs holistically, rather than focusing on a single imperfection like suboptimal asterisks.

> It seems to me that you expect some perfect solution to exist

First, I don't mean in the Microsoft Word scenario, really (where I think that for very many applications, especially most books and most documentation, it's a very good tool).

I mean on the web. If you're putting markdown in front of end users on the web, or even content contributors on the web, you're failing.

Second, you're putting words into my mouth when you talk about a perfect solution because I said no such thing. I clearly said better solution. The absence of a perfect solution does not make Markdown equally as good as other possibilities.

(For example, I believe that if you had to deploy a text-only editor to web-based end-users, Asciidoc is a more appropriate solution, even if I also accept it has lost the war)

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#120

Post by k__ »

cryptos wrote: post #77

I'm wondering that the article doesn't mention AsciiDoc with a single word. AsciiDoc is a perfect tool for complex text documents with tables, references, side notes etc. It is almost as easy as Markdown (if you compare only the features included in both), but offers way more possibilities. There are also good tools to convert it to different output formats like HTML and PDF. A good starting point is: https://asciido…

Isn't AsciiDoc even presentation independent?
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