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Why Is Markdown Popular?

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#51

Post by orwin »

My sister, ex-chef curently a biology student at the uni, have no idea how to develop or how to fix her computer issues. She uses joplin, and edit her markdown notes through a text editor. She told me it took her 5 minutes to understand how to add images (and she still don't understand how the alignment works, but to be fair, only LateX is working well for this).

In fact, not using a WYSIWYG editor have an advantage if you're not a professionnal Word user: you don't loose time fiddling with the setting, selectionning texts, not getting why you should backspace twice here and once there (Fuck you Jira) and remove all "automagic".

I made a post about powershell yesterday and explained that to me, while PS was more pwerfull than bash (and easier), my lack of understanding and trust made me wary. Someone responded to me on a tangent on ExtJS: `it's a really good example of "simple vs. easy"`. This is the case here. Markdown is just simple (for the user).

I think my brother tried to taught her vim and build her a customized vim with markdown, surround, biology french dictionnaries[0] and a better autocomplete, but i don't think she uses it (because while it is easier, it is not simple. Hey, same thing!).

[0] I had no idea you could do this, but he made it so that if she was in the "marine biology" folder, she have a different dictionnary than if she is in the "microbiology" or "chemistry" folder. This made my LaTeX-fu even better than in was.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#53

Post by Beltalowda »

Freak_NL wrote: post #11
Beltalowda wrote: post #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 grea…

In every company there will be a few who just can't grasp Markdown, but they can't grasp any markup language, and struggle in WYSIWYG editors (like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Google Docs) too (usually not grasping the concept of the document outline created by applying header styles correctly). The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technologic…

It's always going to be hard to settle on a solution that works for everyone; I also struggle with things like Google Docs. But if people struggle with Markdown and word processors ... yeah, I don't know what else can be done.

> an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.

Yeah, I don't expect the current situation to be resolved any time soon.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#54

Post by orwin »

WolfOliver wrote: post #50
mpweiher wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Of course it is. Because for plain text markdown you don't need a markdown-specific or even markdown-aware app. Any old plain text editor will do. Which is kind of the point.

then the critic of the article is valid again. Its just not fun to write a table in a plain text editor.

No, but there is fun ways to do it. when i used Latx a lot, i had an awk script that wrote the table in my file from a CSV. Also, now i think most data inspection tools (panda and mysql at least, probably others) spit their data in the terminal in markdown form, so its a cpy pasta anyway.

the only issue with markdown is image alignment. And to be honest, WYSIWYG editors are shit at this too. I'd rather not loose my time.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#55

Post by Beltalowda »

Lio wrote: post #13
Beltalowda wrote: post #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 grea…

> Writing emphasis is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted. Being able to keep docu…

> Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.

I'm a big fan of this as well; another huge upshot is that you can write the documentation at the same time as the code and bring it along during the code review.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#56

Post by chrismorgan »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #25

>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a…

Your first two points are misleading:

1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places.

Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not just a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used ![alt text](href) for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically.

2. The source quotation was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#57

Post by evgen »

halfbrite wrote: post #36
azangru wrote: post #15

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Not only is this probably incorrect; but even if it were the case, then: - so what? - doesn't this contradict the title lamenting the popularity of markdown?

You are right. Case and point; Discord - bringing basic markdown to the masses.

Slack and Discord have probably made more people into casual Markdown users who do not even know that they are using Markdown. When I told my wife Obsidian lets her keep notes using Markdown she was not convinced, once she tried her response was 'oh, it is just like one big Slack message window'.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#58

Post by Stranger43 »

longrod wrote: post #33

HTML is not for writing but for creating UIs. That was why it was created anyway. Markdown was specifically created for writing. It has no other purpose. Saying that Markdown is bad is really naive. There are not many ways to specify formatting without it getting in the way of your writing. Markdown is popular because it strikes the right balance where reading a markdown document requires a lot less visual strain com…

Html was absolutely created for writing, though it later got hijacked as a system for creating UI's inside of the browser doing the browser wars of the 90ies, but if you look at the original specs, it's a way of marking up documents and it was very much readable even without a rendering engine.

Prior to html and the web revolution people would use different macro packages for either troff or TeX and, and in the first years of HTML people would absolutely write it by hand thinking very little of it but then again that was before style elements css and javascript.

After the browser wars almost everyone who working with documentation had their own perl, or ruby scripts to take some simplified markdown syntax into html and there is of cause a risk of markdown itself getting bloated to the point where people need scripts to turn simple meta formats into correct markdown.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#59

Post by TheLoafOfBread »

People are lazy by default, they prefer simplicity and convenience. HTML compared to markdown has better results, but is less convenient and more complex. That's all what is there.

I used to write notes in HTML and for example creating list in HTML is annoyingly slow and tedious process, while creating list in markdown is just writing one symbol. Done.

Then you will get to create inline code or block of code, suddenly you need to write span (or div) pointing on a CSS class where you will specify formatting of that inline code. So you need to link CSS file or have CSS code in header of your HTML file. In markdown you will just use one symbol (or three for code block). Done.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#60

Post by vanderZwan »

> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all.

While most other complaints sounded more like the typical markdown grumpiness I've heard before, I do find this an interesting argument. Why even have article, section, etc. if markdown ensures we're never going to use it? It's not like these are truly exotic tags that are complicated in their usage. Of course if you allow mixing html tags with markdown this is a bit of a non-problem in practice.

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