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Why Is Markdown Popular?

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Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#151

Post by Gordonjcp »

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.

There's nothing stopping you forking a project like Github did and making a Jrib-Flavoured-Markdown parser. I'd use it, just to get the italics and bold right.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#152

Post by valarauko »

another_devy wrote: post #114
Avshalom wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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

MD => .tex to .pdf works with citations, but when I last used it I still had to write the tables in pure latex. With any even vaguely complex figures or subfigures, I had to resort to latex. The bulk of the text could be in MD, but I had to write non-trivial portions in latex.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#153

Post by tanseydavid »

My biggest attraction to Markdown has been avoiding ANY use of browser-based WYSIWYG editors.

Multiple times the author asserts that people will resort to a WYSIWYG tool for some Markdown formatting. I expect this is largely true, but I can't be the only one who has sworn off WYSIWYG in the browser but it ends being so frustrating.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#154

Post by tanseydavid »

User23 wrote: post #108
prepend wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make markdown tables by hand. Very simple ones. And simple is good. Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” There are lots of tables in markdown. I’m not sure how you definitively know if they are made by hand or cut and pasted from a helper tool. Anyway, it’s a dumb argument to make. The beauty of markdown is that if you do…

> Statements like “no one” are silly because they are easy to disprove and then get into “well maybe you do, but I don’t; therefore…” You know exactly what the intended meaning is, because it’s a common idiom. For example, “nobody goes there anymore.” This is pseudopedantry just like intentionally misinterpreting phrases of the form “this or that” as nonexclusive disjunctions is. It can be used humorously, but taken…

I have to disagree strongly with this response.

I do not think the post you are replying to, intended any sort of humor and I also think they made a correct and important point. I would have posted if they had not already done so.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#155

Post by Optimal_Persona »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #133

Textile. IYKYK But really it comes down to historically the time and place when it was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.

I always thought Textile was the superior Betamax to Markdown's VHS, but John Gruber's popularity is what helped Markdown take over.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#156

Post by ixtenu »

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 ]

> Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one?

"square the circle"

The Markdown link format is [text](url) and [] is square-ish and () is circle-ish.

Your mileage may vary (as with any mnemonic), but this one works for me.

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#157

Post by joernl »

I chose markdown for a large project due to the reduce storage size and forced simplicity and abstraction.

I have to work with static data which will not change for 10 years, the only way to keep it alive is upcasting the internal structure and updating the conversion to html.

The project lives in a scientific environment but is used by a wide variety of people.

The project is now 5 years old and until next week there was no wysiwyg-editor (I'm currently working on it).

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#158

Post by xigoi »

I_complete_me wrote: post #125
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.

At least the installation is easy, unlike many projects written is other languages where you need to manually install a billion dependencies and edit some obscure configuration files :)

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#159

Post by xigoi »

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…

QWERTY and similar keyboard layouts are not designed for phones. I recommend MessagEase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me...

(Unfortunately it's proprietary and patented, but I haven't found anything better)

Re: Why Is Markdown Popular?

#160

Post by xigoi »

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 ]

Weirdly enough, I remembered it as “the parts are in the order I'd intuitively expect, but the brackets are not”.
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