Oh man a markdown local copy of MDN would be fantastic!
clone and build, done.
MDN converted to Markdown
111–120 of 140 posts
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#112It'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…
- Markdown vs LaTeX
- HTML vs LaTeX (ok maybe I'm being a bit silly)
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#113> HTML cruft, like crept into the source, often from authors pasting HTML from another rich editing environment into the MDN WYSIWYG editor
That's a problem with a bad WYSIWYG editor, not HTML in general.
> authors were faced with the result of 15 years of people pasting rich content into the WYSIWYG editor, resulting in [a ton of garbled HTML markup]
... But you could have cleaned up the HTML.
> The beauty of Markdown, to you as a writer, is that it lets you concentrate on expressing concepts and hardly thinking about syntax at all.
I entirely disagree because there are few WYSIWYG editors for it and almost certainly not for "that one non-standard extension" everyone adds to their flavor.
I'll give them that HTML particularly sucks for code examples, which is a very good reason to switch, but the comparison in the article is not a very fair one - it's bungled HTML vs Markdown.
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either
"I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the other meaning of the word "have" (the non-auxiliary meaning), like "I had had steak, and James had had lasagna, but we both were still hungry."
Subjunctive may be interesting to analyze, but it's not an additional form of the word.
By my count, English has 12 tenses. You cannot just invent new ones, because people won't be able to understand you. They are fairly regular: present, past, and future, which can be modified by making them perfect, continuous, or both.
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a…
There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary
Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw some z's in there, they really add some pizzazz to the language. (Just ignore the British, they will try to get you to change them back to s's... but you can see what that does to the pizzazz!).
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#116Earlier 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…
I thought Linux vs BSD and C vs Lisp were traditional examples of this.
Also C vs pascal and ada.
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#117Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are on the right track but may be over estimating the "average" internet user capabilities? I had to migrate a couple of projects from awful, big ridden, wysiwyg editors to markdown and it's a huge challenge. Many people expect everything to work just as Ms Office/word does. Anything behaving in any way different than their benchmark is wrong.. Now, going from such a mindset to Markdown is a huge endeavou…
I really don’t get the push for markdown etc over WYSIWYG for everyday people. The _very first_ web browser was also an GUI editor, and then you already had proper rich text editors since at least the Macintosh. Why should users not expect something as basic as formatting text to follow UI conventions established through what’s now forty-odd years of use by billions or people? It is akin to asking them not to complai…
Technical users are an important user segment as well, especially those used to advanced text editors and IDEs. They don't have the patience to conform to the changing and often poorly thought-through user interfaces of text processors and want the flexibility to use more powerful tools if required.
Do it like JIRA: give them both. People used to GUIs can use the WYSIWYG interface, and power users can use Markdown.
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#119Earlier 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 (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.
Re: MDN converted to Markdown
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes). >…
Before English, French was the international language of diplomacy, and it was very influental in science and humanities. Spoken French is as simple as Spanish at a glance. The writing system is peculiar, but still much more regular than the English one.