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Thoughts on Markdown

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#121

Post by acmdas »

While I've been a "geek" since I joined IBM in 1967, I've been primarily a writer for at least 35 years. In that time, I've used Wordstar, WordPerfect, literally every flavour of MS Word up to 2011, vi, iTerm and emacs.

I've converted files of one format to another to another to another, and finally to ASCII text and that is that. No more orphaning as one or another company goes out of business or decides to update their file format.

My editor now is Emacs and, depending on who/what I'm writing for I use plain text, or org or md if I need to include basic formatting. I've published enough to know that I'm a wordsmith, not an artist and going beyond basic formatting is a job for a typographic artist, which I'm not.

I know that makes me a grumpy old fart, as does my refusal to rely on The Cloud (i.e., Somebody Else's Computer) for backups, and so be it. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice (or more), shame on me.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#122

Post by [deleted] »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #119
civilized wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#123

Post by 8note »

Fnoord wrote: post #87
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 o…

Readable to me is that you don't need to convert it to another format to be able to read or make edits. A textbox input on a webpage is sufficient for me to read and and write markdown.

And when you read my comment, you don't even have to know that it's markdown to be able to read it.

The moment you add a structure to it, you need to worry about having compatible parsers or it's going to forget to pull out some of your paragraphs and the like, and if there's a missing curly brace, your parser will throw an error. You'll still be looking at the obfuscated source data

Html is already the open standard, but people like markdown instead

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#124

Post by thangalin »

tonetheman wrote: post #90
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?

Thank you. See the following links for details:

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/tree/master/docs

* https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/var...

I visualize the interpolated variables as a tree with many branches due to their recursive relationship.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#125

Post by prepend »

I don’t want an “authoring experience.” I want a simple, durable text format that will still be around and useful in 10 years.

I like that markdown is cheap, free, and independent of any platform or language or tool.

When coupled with git, the editorial experience is fantastic through diff and merges.

It’s not for everyone and author can use what ve likes. But the author proposes something that in no way is as useful as markdown.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#126

Post by projektfu »

fjorde wrote: post #22

First, many thanks to the author for a reasoned and researched post. The editing/mass-adoption sides of the text formatting story vis-a-vis markdown were well told. I think the story of text is important and misunderstood and evaluation brings better understanding. So please take the rest of this as a supplement more than an argument, even if a lot of it is a disagreement about the value and future of markdown and wh…

I know I'm an outlier, but I started using "styles" in Word 5 for the Mac in high school around 1992 and tried to avoid writing papers without them. The trouble for teaching was with the tool being broadly available (through preinstallation or piracy), most people not having a manual, and none of the teachers being really familiar with it. With styles, Word could format a table of contents automatically without any issue. It could also format indexes and, I believe, cross references. (Interestingly, I think recovering MS Word for Mac documents before version 6 is difficult).

I could tell Microsoft was trying to come up with a way to encourage style usage as they enhanced Word for Windows, but I think most people still defaulted to pushing things around with spaces and setting their fonts manually.

HTML's default styles caused people to start with H3 or something like that, because H1 is usually frighteningly large. LaTeX came with much more reasonable default styles but nobody was going to be able to start using it without reading a bit about it and then coloring within the lines of someone else's document structure.

I really appreciate that Markdown makes the headings easy. It doesn't give you a good way of demarcating sections and has no standard way to give hints to further processing. But you can definitely split up the document into rational parts and know that you can apply the formatting later.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#127

Post by Fnoord »

8note wrote: post #123
Fnoord wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Readable to me is that you don't need to convert it to another format to be able to read or make edits. A textbox input on a webpage is sufficient for me to read and and write markdown. And when you read my comment, you don't even have to know that it's markdown to be able to read it. The moment you add a structure to it, you need to worry about having compatible parsers or it's going to forget to pull out some of yo…

Well, I have a somewhat fresh take on it, as complex algebra (and therefore mathematics and programming) yields me migraine-like symptoms. Sadly, if I might add. So I am def. in game for the most simple markup language (JSON isn't it, I know that much, its was convenient to pick up hype because people who work with web design already knew JavaScript which was and is popular among web designers or frontend devs as its called nowadays).

In the end, its all structured. Even a letter is structured, but just with language and courtesy rules (grammar, for example). There's different levels of quality and complexity in that field, too. There's only so much you can do with ASCII characters to make text more structured. You quickly descent into the world of adding programming syntax to it (one asterisk for bullet point or two asterisks for bold are already). You can keep it very simple, you still gotta know the markup rules, as simple as they are.

In gaming, there's an adagio: easy to learn, hard to master. I believe a good language holds true to that. Mathematics certainly does (with exceptions).

With regards to JSON though, when you unjustify it, and you use syntax highlighting, is it really that bad? I find the only annoying thing is when you add an entry, you have to ensure the comma is correctly there (or not), but syntax highlighting and habit helps there.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#128

Post by dash2 »

unfocussed_mike wrote: post #102
civilized wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

I write academic articles and like to use markdown for that, but you soon run into limitations that require non-standard tools. Precisely formatted tables… citations… line numbering… page numbering… inline maths… image placement… none are part of basic markdown. Outputting nice text is a big complex job, as the existence of TeX (ugh) shows.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#129

Post by dash2 »

bluenose69 wrote: post #32
jonathanstrange wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not writing or reading LaTeX, properly written LaTeX is very readable. It's easy to maintain and understand, and Bibtex for bibliographies works fine once you've gotten used to it. The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the pream…

You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`? After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal become…

> LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system.

Here’s how you put an image on TeX:

\begin{figure} \caption{A picture of a tucan.} \begin{center} \includegraphics{tucan.eps} \end{center} \end{figure}

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#130

Post by vlark »

Anybody remember setext, which was used in the original TidBITS newsletters back in the early 1990s? When Gruber introduced Markdown back '04, it struck me as an enhancement on setext more than anything else.
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