Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

MDN converted to Markdown

openwebdocs.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 140 posts

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#71

Post by tekchip »

javajosh wrote: post #69
mananaysiempre wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AC is easy to change the voltage of with 20th-century tech (even high-power 21st-century tech for DC amounts to “convert to AC, shift that, filter it back” with some—crucial—improvements), so it works reasonably well over moderate distances at moderate power if you shift down as late as possible, but it’s absolutely awful for transporting large quantities of energy over long distances, because of the skin effect. Ess…

>you end up using absolutely asinine amounts of (nowadays very expensive) copper or (kind of expensive) aluminium in high-voltage lines I assume there's some reason big hollow wires don't work.

>I assume there's some reason big hollow wires don't work.

So pipes then. The internet really would have been a series of tubes. ;-)

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#72

Post by photochemsyn »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

As far as MDN Web Docs, what about variable declaration, i.e. deprecating the JS var in favor of let and const, universally? var has some weird behavior (hoisting) and it seems (no expert here) that only using let and const in code has many benefits. Is it historical inertia, backwards compatibility, preference?

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#73

Post by beebeepka »

otikik wrote: post #26
beebeepka wrote: post #13

Recently I overheard that our company intends to use markdown for configuration purposes - replacing yaml and stuff. I am not against the idea but it did surprise me because while I am happy with writing documents in MD, it never occurred to me that it could be used for configs. Not sure what the upsides and downsides are.

> use markdown for configuration purposes - replacing yaml and stuff That sounds unlikely. Where did you hear that?

CTO mentioned it several times and I was in no mood to ask questions

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#74

Post by pantojax45 »

whoibrar wrote: post #65
rrwo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is appealing because you can read a markdown document without knowing markdown. It's intended to make sense on it's own.

I agree with this. Reddit and Discord both use markdown and I've been using it for ages without ever knowing it's called Markdown. I just thought it's a neat trick you can apply italics by underscore and make text stand out with back ticks around. Even least technical people using bold/italics/indent on WhatsApp are using markdown in a way.

The bold/italics/indent syntax predates markdown. Markdown is great but the “*” / “_” / “>” were all in use before it (see Usenet emails for example)

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#75

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

enriquto wrote: post #37
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

> In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. Why is that? Raw HTML is quite simple to understand and edit. Especially modern html5. There may be a slightly marginal improvement with bold markings with stars versus b tags, but I wouldn't call it "huge" by any means. EDIT: of course, you can build nightmares with plain HTML. Especially when it is auto-generated. But hand-written simple HTML is essentially eq…

Reading HTML with your eyes includes far more line noise than reading Markdown, though.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#76

Post by thayne »

rrwo wrote: post #62
nerdponx wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> has a steeper learning curve Does it? I think Markdown "won" for a variety of reasons (Github? Slack? Pandoc?). I don't think AsciiDoc is so much more complicated than Markdown that people can't learn it quickly. The reason Markdown is now standard is that people like standardized things. They want to use the same syntax in their chatroom, forum, ad-hoc readme filed, and doc comments in code. And if they're already…

Markdown is appealing because you can read a markdown document without knowing markdown. It's intended to make sense on it's own.

The same is largely true of asciidoc. There are cases where you do kind of need to understand asciidoc, but mostly for features where in markdown you have to reach for the escape hatch of inline html.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#77

Post by Grokify »

nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

AsciiDoc may have a naming issue. I'm speculating that it's not restricted to the ASCII character set but the immediate question that comes to mind is what is restricted to ASCII and if it can support Unicode or even ISO 8859.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#78

Post by appleflaxen »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

I thought

Linux vs BSD

and

C vs Lisp

were traditional examples of this.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#79

Post by michaelcampbell »

Grokify wrote: post #77
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

AsciiDoc may have a naming issue. I'm speculating that it's not restricted to the ASCII character set but the immediate question that comes to mind is what is restricted to ASCII and if it can support Unicode or even ISO 8859.

Anecdata to be sure, but over the years I've seen a lot of Asciidoc vs Markdown articles, and naming has never once been listed as an issue.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#80

Post by radarsat1 »

swyx wrote: post #8
nerdponx wrote: post #6

It's too bad that AsciiDoc still hasn't really caught on like Markdown. It's a whole lot nicer for more-complicated documents. I understand their reasons for not using it here, but it still seems like a perfect fit for this task. Eclipse still seems to be working on a formal spec, but hopefully that will help implementations to grow and adoption to increase. In any case, avoiding raw HTML is a huge improvement. I lik…

Markdown is "worse is better". AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve, therefore it lost. tale as old as tech. EDIT: i'm compiling a list of "Worse is Better" technology battles: - Mixed paradigm languages vs Functional languages - Typescript vs Flow - React+Redux beat Angular and Elm - VHS beat Betamax - AC beat DC - what else? please share more here https://hashnode.com/preview/636602dec7fec996…

what was the deal with Betamax though? was VHS actually easier or have any advantages, or did it just win due to marketing? (honest curiosity here, i don't know the technicalities)
Post reply on HN