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Thoughts on Markdown

smashingmagazine.com

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#141

Post by spc476 »

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…

> Imagine any company on earth having five-thousand blog posts worth of content. At the end of the day what is the only format that can be guaranteed "readable" in 5-10-20 years time, when some internal analyst wants to find out what people have been posting?

I have over 3,000+ posts for my blog [1] and I can answer that: HTML. All my posts are stored in HTML [2]. A few years ago I started using my own markup language (a mashup of Markdown and Org Mode) but I never store anything in that format; I only store the rendered HTML output. That way, I don't get stuck with a markup style that I no longer like.

Also, I don't see Microsoft Word going away anytime soon. Every other developer at $JOB writes documentation in Microsoft Word [3]. On a corporate managed Windows laptop. Joy.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/ I've been blogging since December 1999.

[2] Each post as a file. The storage format has not changed at all in 22 years.

[3] I inadverently found myself working for an enterprise company when the company I was hired at got bought out.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#142

Post by nieve »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #100
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those ways of styling were firmly enough established that a lot of people thought Markdown was violating them by having asterisks render as italic instead of bold. Italic was represented with slashes!

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#143

Post by IgniteTheSun »

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 have never understood why Markdown has gotten so much attention over the last decade while ReStructured Text - which is a similar format but actually standardized and more developed than Markdown - gets so little.

Tools like DocUtils and Sphinx allow one to do quite a lot with ReStructured Text, and I believe Pandoc can convert it to Markdown without any issues.

If you aren't familiar with it, a good hard look at ReStructured Text may be worth your time.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#144

Post by charlieyu1 »

IgniteTheSun wrote: post #143
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 have never understood why Markdown has gotten so much attention over the last decade while ReStructured Text - which is a similar format but actually standardized and more developed than Markdown - gets so little. Tools like DocUtils and Sphinx allow one to do quite a lot with ReStructured Text, and I believe Pandoc can convert it to Markdown without any issues. If you aren't familiar with it, a good hard look at R…

I have never used rest, took a look and feel that manual underlines for sections are very clunky. And tables, one of the parts that I think markdown isn’t doing well, rest isn’t really better

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#145

Post by filmgirlcw »

kmelve wrote: post #136
filmgirlcw wrote: post #44

I find this article to be sort of ridiculous. Sure, some of the critiques about the various flavors of Markdown might be valid (but I would posit that for the non-technical users the author claims to be so concerned about, the chances of them regularly having to interact with more than one flavor (and no, Slack and Reddit don’t count), is extremely low), but the whole piece seems to be an advertisement for the author…

The author here! I'm kinda bummbed out that the post read as an ad. I was super nervous to publish this because it I knew I was poking at something that's near and dear to a lot of devs (myself included). But I have experienced enough friction with Markdown in the real world and wanted to explore poking what I see as the status quo. And it seems to have sparked some conversation, which was what I wanted. I'm truly no…

Thanks for taking the time to engage. And I want to be clear, I think Portable Text could be something really excellent for it’s intended use case. I guess I just see that as fundamentally at odds with what Markdown is. I understand your point that Markdown is often used in place it probably shouldn’t be, but I still think we’re talking about two different problems. For me, it isn’t that something like Portable Text doesn’t have a place, it’s that I don’t think it is best compared to something like Markdown.

I agree we should do a better job of showing what options are best for certain scenarios, but I feel like someone making a decision to adopt a really customized version of Markdown needs a different sort of intervention/push to a more desirable format (maybe Portable Text) than the people that actively choose Markdown BECAUSE it is a readable syntax for crafting HTML and their goal is to write HTML in a readable way.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#146

Post by omaranto »

nieve wrote: post #142
apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Those ways of styling were firmly enough established that a lot of people thought Markdown was violating them by having asterisks render as italic instead of bold. Italic was represented with slashes!

Emacs' Org mode gets this right.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#147

Post by irrational »

> the appeal of plain text files is understandable. But that era is pretty much gone with the emergence of backends as a service. Services and tools like Fauna, Firestore, Hasura, Prisma, PlanetScale, and Sanity’s Content Lake, invest heavily in developer experience.

Am I the only one who has never heard of any of these?

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#148

Post by irrational »

> Portable Text isn’t design to be written or be easily readable in its raw form; it’s designed to be produced by an user interface, manipulated by code, and to be serialized and rendered where ever it needs to go.

Oh hell no. The most important aspect of markdown to me is that it is human readable in text file format. I can be quite certain that in 500 years (assuming humanity lasts that long and still has computers) that my notes in markdown will still be completely legible.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#149

Post by compiler-guy »

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…

>The ability to render an automatic table of contents based on hash-tags or gather/conform citations and references programatically, has _never_ been a selling point of word or any other editor until recently when markdown starting making this type of feature obvious.

This is not true. Word processors have had this feature almost since the beginning.

Microsoft Word autogenerated a TOC from text styled as a header all the way back in the nineties.

WordPerfect 4.2 (1988) could generate a table of contents via specially tagged text. It also supported paragraph numbering and auto footnote and endnote handling. This was specifically added to speed adoption in the legal market and it worked. Law offices are some of the last WordPerfect holdouts today.

I don’t believe Wordstar had such a feature though.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#150

Post by goldsteinq »

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…

The hard part isn’t \section{Introduction}, but horrible hacks like \makeatletter you need to do something non-trivial.
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