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Why Is Markdown Popular?

russellbeattie.com

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#111

Post by pessimizer »

jrib wrote: post #93
Gordonjcp wrote: post #26

I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it. ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by un…

I wish the slashes for italic had made it into what is currently Markdown. /italics/ and *bold* feel much more natural to me than having to remember whether a single asterisk ( text ) or double asterisk (*text*) corresponds to italics or bold.

You can escape asterisks on HN with \.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#112

Post by gilbetron »

virtualritz wrote: post #77
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…

Random question, why is she branching? Why doesn't she just commit straight to master?

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#114

Post by another_devy »

Avshalom wrote: post #100
virtualritz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>>My partner is writing her PhD thesis [...] in Markdown. Is she though? Markdown doesn't even have image captions or like support for citations.

I think you if you use something like pandoc it allows to at markups for centering and citation refs, which I'm guessing was used for .md => .tex to .pdf. But they will be rendered plain text in makrdown preview

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#115

Post by pessimizer »

matijsvzuijlen wrote: post #65
frizlab wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asciidoc is much better IMHO

Asciidoc starts out great but has a lot of surprising gotchas and complexities.

I dislike Markdown, but I can't help finding Asciidoc annoying. There's got to be an "Asciidoc: The Good Parts" waiting to be written.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#116

Post by D13Fd »

This post is absolutely right.

I've been keeping my personal notes as a folder of text files formatted with Markdown for 10+ years.

I honestly really don't like it in some ways. My work involves a ton of characters that trip up Markdown interpreters, and I end up having to escape them (brackets, asterisks)--and not all editors treat them, or the escape characters, the same way.

But nothing else fits my use case as well, so I've stuck with Markdown.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#117

Post by MrVandemar »

WolfOliver wrote: post #44

The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already. Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one? [text]( http://url ) [ http://url](text) ( http://url)[text] (text)[ http://url ]

I'm always having to look up the link format for reddit, and I always seem to get it backwards one-way-or-another first try. That's where markdown breaks down, at least for my uses. When you get beyond headings, lists, bold and italics, the complexity increases sharply.

Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures.

this is bold is really not much different This is a link and the heirarchy of .

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#118

Post by deltarholamda »

grose wrote: post #97

I think in order to make HTML a friendly document standard it needs to be easy to type on mobile. At least in my experience it is quite painful typing HMTL tags (needing to dance between 3 keyboards). This could be implemented with a built-in WYSIWYG style editor on mobile (maybe piggy-back on the contentEditable stuff?). I would love it if there was a standard native rich text widget for HTML. On one of my sites (me…

>it needs to be easy to type on mobile

This is a great point. I've written a lot of stuff just using HTML, even doing the table formatting, by just opening up BBEdit and going to town. It's really easy once you learn the basics. There are (were?) a lot of secretaries who deeply loved WordPerfect because of the ability to open up the codes window so they could fix weird formatting errors. They're just a couple of steps from authoring directly in HTML if they so wanted.

But it didn't occur to me that a non-trivial amount of stuff is composed on somebody's phone. A WYSIWYG editor on mobile is certainly doable, but screen real estate is precious on a phone. Markdown certainly helps with that.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#119

Post by infensus »

WolfOliver wrote: post #44

The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already. Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one? [text]( http://url ) [ http://url](text) ( http://url)[text] (text)[ http://url ]

I memorized it by thinking about it like a function call — so () comes last

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#120

Post by pessimizer »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #89
WolfOliver wrote: post #44

The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already. Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one? [text]( http://url ) [ http://url](text) ( http://url)[text] (text)[ http://url ]

Muscle memory? Do you have trouble remembering how anchor tags work in html?

You're appealing to the law of averages here; all things aren't necessarily equally easy to remember. There's no arbitrary order that has to be remembered with an anchor tag: all tags start with an angle bracket, what they are (if we include the "/" in the name), and a list of attributes, and are closed with another angle bracket. If some elements were opened with square brackets and closed with angle brackets, it would be harder to remember. It would be worse if there were also others that opened with angle brackets and closed with square brackets.

It will always be easier to remember a 10-letter name than a 10-digit number.

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