Why Is Markdown Popular?
russellbeattie.com
Why Is Markdown Popular?
1–10 of 179 posts
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#2I actually love using plain text to create documents, but I'm also bothered by the irregularity and non-extensibility of Markdown, which is why I created xidoc: https://xidoc.nim.town/
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#3Hi,
It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. »
The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/
What do you think of this answer?
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#4> Blockquotes. Are people really typing > before each paragraph? No, they’re using an editor.
Yes they are, and no they aren't, respectively.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#5Markdown is the worst way to write HTML except for all the rest.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#6> Markdown will never get beyond developers.
In my experience it works pretty well for non-developers. I added it to our email client years ago as an alternative to the WYSIWYG editor, and quite a few non-developers liked and used it. Also see Reddit, which uses it. While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there.
As for the larger point: do I have a great love of Markdown? Not really; I think some of the other similar formats are better. But it works "well enough", and switching syntaxes is hard so I "just use Markdown" . I hate the "GitHub flavoured Markdown" with a passion though; the way it deals with newlines is just fundamentally broken and it's inconsistent even on GitHub where some things are GFM and some things are not (which they need to be, because GFM is fundamentally broken) leading to sillyness like copy/pasting text from one part of GitHub to another part ending up with badly formatted text.
Either way, whatever the faults of Markdown may be, I sure as hell prefer it over any HTML subset. Writing emphasis is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; there's few things I dislike more than having to focus on the presentation as I'm writing something.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#7The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects).
The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way to store formatted text without the horrors of full blown HTML. You can stick some markdown in a CMS database, render it on a webpage, and get the most common formatting: links, bullet points, bold. Great.
On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2.
But mixed in there, the author seems to have some weird assumptions that people are using Markdown primarily to write documentation, and this is somehow Markdown's fault. I genuinely don't understand this, or their point 13 "It’s 2022, we shouldn’t be using ascii-text to write documents."
Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#8Markdown is the worst way to write HTML except for all the rest.
You had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#9I like Markdown for self-contained one page documents with basic formatting - reddit comments, README.md etc.
For anything more it's just inadequate.
Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?
#10The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects). The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way…
For their major gripe that point 13 is a pretty weak one. Text editors can present a Markdown document any way you want, and even a WYSIWYG editor is possible if you like that.
Besides, Markdown fully supports alternate character encodings, not just ASCII (that would make Markdown really obsolete). Most people surely use UTF-8 for Markdown documents.