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Why Is Markdown Popular?

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#131

Post by michaelt »

ycombobreaker wrote: post #85
kevincox wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - .

Ehhh there's "Markdown" and there's "markdown". Slack definitely has markdown, and any argument to the contrary is a "No True Scotsman" fallacy. I personally use hyperlink text, bullet lists, tt/bold/italics, quote blocks, pre blocks.

A few years ago, Slack was "plain text entry box for markdown"

In ~2019, it changed to "WYSIWYG with markdown converted to WYSIWYG as you type". If you type "Hello *world*" the * will disappear and the "world" will be bolded - and you can also get bold with Ctrl+B or pressing a 'bold' button or pasting bold rich text.

There's an option to disable it [1], so if your slack experience is different you might have WYSIWYG disabled.

And if you think markdown usually means *foo* producing italics, and **foo** for bold, all I can say is yes.

[1] https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/1201955273667158023?lang=...

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#132

Post by dpkirchner »

To me it comes down to one basic thing: I can create decent looking text content without using my mouse/trackpad or F-keys. It's about as easy to write as it could possibly be. Additionally, I don't have to worry about the editor inserting weird annoying-to-parse markup elements mid-text as I've seen in Word documents (in the docx XML).

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#134

Post by potatochup »

lancebeet wrote: post #102
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?

It's also amusing given that Microsoft teams has at least limited support for markdown. Depending on how you define a markdown user, it may be a that the majority of people typing markdown have never written a line of code but have discovered the convenience of markdown from being power users of Microsoft teams.

God, there is nothing that I hate more than MS teams editor. It's the worst of wysiwyg editing. Discord does it right imo.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#135

Post by prewett »

prepend wrote: post #31

“I don’t like popular thing. It sucks. There should be something better.” Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable. I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.

I'd like Markdown if things were non-arbitrary. Is asterisk or underline italics? Does the href go before or after the link text? And I have no idea what the format of lists is, I guess you just put "-" or "1." and it automatically recognizes it?

> Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes

I bet you can teach people the subset of HTML that includes the Markdown features in about five minutes, too.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#136

Post by giantrobot »

vanderZwan wrote: post #104
giantrobot wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of Markdown isn't to replace HTML. It lets you write a plaintext document that can be post-processed into a rich text document (including HTML). It doesn't define the rich text template, styling, or anything else. It certainly isn't meant to have a 1:1 relationship with every HTML element. With Markdown I can type up a document in the most brain dead of editors. I can then effectively read that document in…

I agree that that is the "point of Markdown", but that is also not as relevant as how it is actually used. It's one thing to use it as a better BB-code in chat programs, forums and on Github, as other comments mention. However, the article seems to be complaining about how it is used to write websites and articles even when patching the holes in Markdown end up being more of a hassle than just using HTML (that MDN sc…

> However, the article seems to be complaining about how it is used to write websites and articles even when patching the holes in Markdown end up being more of a hassle than just using HTML (that MDN screenshot looks horrible).

Anyone using Markdown for such things is using the wrong tool. That's not the fault of or a failing of Markdown. If someone can't differentiate between the improper use of a tool or failings of the tool maybe they need to not make sweeping statements.

Where Markdown is superior to simple HTML is it does not encourage the sort of nesting that makes HTML painful as a grammar to parse. The simpler grammar (blocks delineated with newlines) actually makes the semantic meaning of the markup easier to deal with so a processor can emit clearer HTML/LaTeX/whatever.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#137

Post by maximus-decimus »

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…

> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor.

That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#138

Post by bborud »

Markdown is popular because it implements just enough features to be useful while not presenting a high threshold for "just writing things down". It exists because traditionally, people who design markup languages have not done a particularly good job in designing something that is suitable for adding a just enough structure to text to make it useful both as text and as rendered document.

(If you want to look at a particularly egregious example of hubris, arrogance and total lack of empathy for users and implementors alike, look at ISO 8879:1986. The cheapest way is probably to get hold of an annotated standard is probably by buying Goldfarb's SGML Handbook. Please burn after reading though - to keep it out of the hands of impressionable kids)

I had a long discussion about using HTML+CSS with one of the designers of CSS many moons ago, and sure, in theory we could have used that. But you need only do a "view source" on any web page you regularly visit to realize that it is anything but low threshold.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#139

Post by mcluck »

chopin wrote: post #103
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…

> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. Afaik GitHub and Stackoverflow use markdown WYSIWYG editors. That'd cover a big chunk of users.

You're incorrect. They include buttons for generating some markdown and a separate preview option but at the end of the day, people are writing markdown. I feel pretty certain that most people who use either of those tools regularly eventually learn the syntax and just type it out because it's faster

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#140

Post by bborud »

tgv wrote: post #81
mcv wrote: post #21

All complaints basically seem to boil down to these two: * It's not standardised * I don't like using it I think the two big advantages of markdown are simply: * It's readable without having to parse it * A lot of people do like using it Replacing it with HTML, as useful as HTML is for its intended purpose, sounds like an incredibly bad idea. There's a very good reason why markdown won: its readability. Except for ta…

Use of block quotes is rare anyway. It's just very practical, easy to adjust, its output fairly well matches your expectation. It covers 99% of your everyday needs.

I occasionally use the syntax used for code highlighting as a substitute. Sure, not the same thing, but still.

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

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