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MDN converted to Markdown

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Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#81

Post by barbariangrunge »

I’ve been using a writing app lately that uses markdown, and that has an export feature to produce documents that interpret your markup in various ways. It’s rather nice to use but is missing a few things: I wish there was a markdown tag to indicate “title” or “author byline” so that # and ## weren’t inconsistently reserved by certain formatting styles.

Altogether, it is a great system though

Off topic: recommend a nodejs tool (or something client side?) to convert markdown to html to make article writing easier for custom sites?

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#82

Post by wbamberg »

Terry2006 wrote: post #5
javajosh wrote: post #2

Oh man a markdown local copy of MDN would be fantastic!

I dream to be able to use the mdn/content repo directly on GitHub. Unfortunately the Markdown links are the "production" site ones and don't work in GitHub. It would be nice to have links that work there and their toolchain (called Yari if I understand well) should translate it when generating the MDN site. It would allow for easier reuse of the content.

This came up the other day, actually! https://github.com/orgs/mdn/discussions/256#discussioncommen... :)

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#83

Post by nerdponx »

kubanczyk wrote: post #20
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…

Out of curiosity I've looked up "asciidoc tutorial". 10% into the first page and I see this: A [.myrole]#custom role# must be fulfilled by the theme. Wait, is this in example 7 of 97? That's already... disturbing? But I scroll just a little down and I see examples 11 and 12: https://chat.asciidoc.org[Discuss AsciiDoc,role=external,window=_blank] CAUTION If the link text contains a comma and the text is followed by on…

What tutorial? The official docs are well-written and rightly don't show advanced features at the beginning: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/document-struct...

> Isn't this literally worse than HTML?

Not in my opinion. How often does this actually come up in technical writing? I'm happy with one or two ugly edge cases if it means that the overall experience is nice: that's a perfectly fine tradeoff to me.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#84

Post by radarsat1 »

jcranmer wrote: post #67
rrwo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added. The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.

The word you're looking for is "pidgin" language, not "pigeon," but no, English is not a pidgin language. An example of a pidgin language is something like Tok Pisin. Pidgin languages essentially start out life as a not-quite-language, with such restricted vocabulary and grammar that there are concepts that can't be uttered, and such languages tend to grow back a grammar on top of that as they develop into a full, pr…

I'm curious, given the proximity of England to the Celtic world, why did English not borrow more from Gaelic? Hopefully it's not a stupid question, I realize that the language probably largely developed in Saxony, but I don't know much about how it made its way to the British isles.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#85

Post by thayne »

nerdponx wrote: post #12
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I think it has a higher learning curve if you include everything in the language, because asciidoc has so many more features than markdown. But if you limit asciidoc to the subset that is comparable to markdown, I don't think it has a higher learning curve.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#86

Post by hombre_fatal »

iopq wrote: post #39
tgv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English isn't a bad language; its spelling is highly inconsistent, but for the rest it's simpler than most other languages. The only advantage Esperanto has is that it doesn't give (much of) an advantage to pre-existing native speakers. For the rest, it's perhaps even harder to learn than English, and --when hypothetically adopted on a large scale-- will develop into regional dialects.

Spanish spelling is better, pronunciation is easier (no th, only 5 vowels, etc.), native speakers almost as numerable, allows you to understand Portuguese, Italian, etc. It wasn't chosen, America just won

Spanish has its own obstacles. Like all the conjugations and the subjunctive. Or how verbose it is.

Meanwhile compare it to English tense grammar like I did run, I do run, I will run.

I don’t think technical language comparisons are all that enlightening about which one is “best”.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#87

Post by urban_alien »

radarsat1 wrote: post #80
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

The porn industry adopted VHS and managed to make it the standard, basically

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#88

Post by nvrspyx »

kubanczyk wrote: post #20
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…

Out of curiosity I've looked up "asciidoc tutorial". 10% into the first page and I see this: A [.myrole]#custom role# must be fulfilled by the theme. Wait, is this in example 7 of 97? That's already... disturbing? But I scroll just a little down and I see examples 11 and 12: https://chat.asciidoc.org[Discuss AsciiDoc,role=external,window=_blank] CAUTION If the link text contains a comma and the text is followed by on…

These are features that don't exist in Markdown though, unless there's some implementation that adds these. Also, the context of the parent comment and this post is documentation.

So, is it worse than HTML? Maybe, if you need those features often, but not for documentation where you'll rarely, if ever, use those.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#89

Post by remram »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #59
swyx wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> AsciiDoc is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve How does this make it better? Sounds like it makes it worse. Maybe a better summation is "less is more".

GP seems to be using a definition of "better" that doesn't include difficulty. I agree that it's a bad decision when evaluating a markup language used in so many contexts as Markdown.

Re: MDN converted to Markdown

#90

Post by thiht »

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…

I used AsciiDoc for a while at my first job because it looked better than Markdown on paper, but I hated it. The syntax made no sense to me, and AsciiDoctor (the de facto tool to generate formatted AsciiDoc documents at the time, not sure if it has changed) was a pain in the ass to use and the output was basically impossible to configure (I just wanted to use the colors of my company).

Markdown feels a lot of less powerful, but somehow "just works". So now I just stick with Markdown everywhere and have never regretted it so far.

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