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Why Is Markdown Popular?

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#71

Post by chrismorgan »

ZiiS wrote: post #63
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…

If you include Slack's Markdoon then they default to the WYSIWYG editor so probably > 1%.

Slack has nothing to do with Markdown. The plain text that its text box turns into formatting bears no meaningful resemblance whatsoever (it’s more similar to some other lightweight markup languages, and really it’s just completely its own thing), and you mostly can’t interact with it in that format anyway. (See also https://api.slack.com/reference/surfaces/formatting.)

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#72

Post by prepend »

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…

I agree and have had success teaching job-devs to use and even create markdown files for project documentation and stuff like that.

It’s also frequently coupled with “learning git” and I’ve found it helpful in governance processes where someone needs to approve or make sight revisions to something before approval. It’s better than signing word documents and emailing them around.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#74

Post by itake »

chrismorgan wrote: post #56
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 c…

I tried to use a markdown table editor and found it was easier to make it by hand. to each their own I guess.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#76

Post by kergonath »

nwellnhof wrote: post #18

While I agree with many of the points, the proposal that we need a a new standard based on HTML is a bit weird. I guess the author hasn't read the HTML5 spec which is a total monstrosity and suffers from problems similar to Markdown. If you want a document format where essentially every document is valid, you have to specify each and every corner case which gets messy very quickly. Just look at the HTML5 spec. To my…

> To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec.

The spec is whatever Gruber’s script is doing, by definition.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#77

Post by virtualritz »

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…

> Markdown will never get beyond developers.

My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.

We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.

I also used git to manage changes.

This was 2009.

He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.

Fast forward to today.

My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).

Not in LaTex but in Markdown.

It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.

It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).

I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.

Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.

After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.

I think there is a business opportunity here.

Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#78

Post by rhaway84773 »

The claim that Markdown will never go beyond developers is kind of ironic considering markdown was co-invented by John Gruber, a non-developer.

There’s a lot of issues with this post, which basically completely misunderstands what markdown is, what its purpose is, and why it’s successful.

Btw, why are numbered lists so hard in Markdown?

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#79

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

> 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.

I don't think that's what Markdown is for.

I think Markdown is meant for the content that would appear inside the `article` tag. You're not meant to use it to create an entire website layout.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#80

Post by MereInterest »

kevincox wrote: post #68
ketzu wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are also the multitude of people that use markdown in chat applications, which usually implement a form of WYSIWYG editing, e.g., Slack.

Does slack even use markdown? It seems to me that it just uses some markdown-like sybtax as a shortcut for generating its rich text. Like Google Docs will start a list after - .

There's an option to post in markdown instead of WYSIWYG. The one and only reason I use Slack's WYSIWYG instead of markdown is because their markdown parser doesn't handle links. If they just fixed that, I could stop using their WYSIWYG and its atrocious handling of inline code blocks.
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