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Why Is Markdown Popular?

russellbeattie.com

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#121

Post by pessimizer »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #78

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?

> 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.

A lot of mystery issues that you are claiming but also not clarifying; at least the post attempts to make a case for something. I don't even know why you don't like Markdown's list markup. Give us a hint?

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#122

Post by MattDemers »

I think part of why it's popular is that it's a sexier implementation of HTML, and as a writer, I found it frustrating to hand in edits to editors (for news websites) in Word format. Being able to give people a plain text version of my article and have it translate anywhere was/is amazing, and it's much smoother to write "" or "*" than it is to put "" or "".

I use Markdown a ton because it's easy to use converters to get that HTML code for blogs or have it built into plugins for Notepad++, Sublime or Atom.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#123

Post by ycombobreaker »

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 ]

My mnemonic is that the parentheses are a following sidenote that can always be skipped by the reader in normal writing. The hyperlink to follow for more information is the parenthetical.

Then the brackets are literally bracketing the text that should be styled as a hyperlink.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#124

Post by umutcankus »

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…

I was using md for nearly all of my works in college. But beyond that, something complex like PhD thesis I cannot even imagine the workflow. Really interested to know more details.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#125

Post by I_complete_me »

xigoi wrote: post #2

I 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/

Let me commend you on this effort. I would definitely consider using it in a situation where markdown did not suffice. It does require nim and nimble to be installed but that doesn't bother me.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#126

Post by pessimizer »

goodpoint wrote: post #66

Markdown is popular because most developers are too lazy to look for better alternative and follow the hivemind.

To expand on the hivemind, it was pushed by an Apple-sponsored tech blogger while Apple was continuing their push to market their laptops to frontend web developers. A bunch of Apple laptop developers then started embedding it although the spec had weird issues. The best substitute was Asciidoc, and it also made a few strange choices and is nearly too complex to justify using over HTML. So, with no good light alternative, Markdown won.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#127

Post by Finnucane »

ogogmad wrote: post #101

I recommend trying out Asciidoc: https://asciidoc.org/ The spec is fairly comprehensive. It's a lightweight markup language like Markdown. It has decent editor support.

Asciidoc was originally designed to be directly translatable into Docbook XML, and thus slot into a Docbook-based production system. So it covers a lot more ground than MD was originally intended to.

There's also rst, which was developed with documentation in mind.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#128

Post by chrismorgan »

ZiiS wrote: post #109
chrismorgan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .)

The page you linked says "This formatting is similar to Markdown markup" so it has something to do with it. Given paragraphs, quotes, lists, and code are interchangeable it is certainly regrettably that links, bold, and italic are different but *bold* vs **bold** is still a meaningful resemblance in my book.

Similarities: _…_ for italics, `…` for code, ```…``` for multiline code (… though this is an unofficial syntax not part of Markdown, though it’s very close to ubiquitous), for delimiting URLs, a > prefix for quotes (which is the most common syntax by far, since it was established decades earlier in email), and entity-encoding of &, for some reason (which, given that they don’t support any other entity-encoding, and don’t use the ampersand, and don’t support escaping any of the rest of the syntax, is all-round weird, like although they weren’t actually following Markdown anywhere else they decided to in this one place for some reason and made a total hash of it).

The only similarities that are not extremely common conventions independent of any specific lightweight markup language are triple-backtick code fences, and entity-encoding.

Differences: no paragraphs, line breaks are hard rather than soft breaks, *…* for bold (in Markdown that’s italics, and **…** or __…__ is bold), lists (apparently this syntax doesn’t actually support lists, driving home how this isn’t even Slack’s “normal” format—I’m not sure how lists are actually implemented, given that you can produce them in the web UI), links, strikethrough, emojification, and all the other stuff from Markdown that’s missing (including any other form of escaping or entity-encoding).

Seriously, the resemblance is very superficial. The name is the part that’s closest, by a considerable margin; not the actual language.

They say “similar to Markdown” because that’s the best-known lightweight markup language, so it’s the obvious reference point.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#130

Post by virtualritz »

gilbetron wrote: post #112
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…

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

When she is unsure about a re-structuring of part of the thesis she makes a branch. It happened twice so far.

Same reasoning for branching when your are single author of a repo. containing code, I guess. A major refactor or structural code change or trying sth. "crazy".

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