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

If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

p.migdal.pl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 282 posts

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#101

Post by inetknght »

hakaneskici wrote: post #78
tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…

Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.

> Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in

Can you point me to a page in Firefox that I can use offline to WYSIWYG edit a hypertext document without needing to use the developer console to edit raw HTML?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#102

Post by johnfernow »

theshackleford wrote: post #25
weikju wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s only possible because some people are hoarders who save this data or software and put it out there..

> That’s only possible because some people are hoarders who save this data or software and put it out there.. Sure. And I appreciate it. Like I appreciate the internet archive etc.

There is no comparable alternative to the Internet Archive though. They've gotten involved in several lawsuits and their future is far from guaranteed. They're an incredibly important organization, but I think it's too important of a project to be limited to one organization, or even one country or region of the earth. A solar flare could destroy a lot of history.

I don't know that the economics of having multiple Internet Archive-like organizations is currently feasible (I imagine getting funding for one of them is hard enough), but even a partial offline mirror hosted someplace else would be nice. Maybe to save space they could take the oldest version of a page, the newest, and the midmost version timewise, discarding all other versions. They could also heavily compress images, video and audio to save storage space (would increase processing costs, but if willing to throw out quality, could compress quickly and still save a bunch of space. E.g. downscale all videos to 480p and use veryfast preset and CRF 28 with ffmpeg. Even 240p is a lot better than nothing. A pixelated form of history is better than no history.)

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#103

Post by Beijinger »

Hm. Great.

I save everything interesting. I have a data folder with letters a-z in it. Something interesting might be saved in HTML or PDF under data/a/ai/programming

Folders have a problem because the same thing could be saved under data/p/programming/ai

But it is a start. For everything else, there is recoll. https://www.recoll.org/

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#104

Post by genewitch »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…

The nextcloud Markdown editor shows a live view while you edit... Its called "Notes"

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#105

Post by pimlottc »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #90
dangus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the parent commenter but I'm going to guess because HTML is horrible at WYSIWYG. If your editing tool changes or if your switch editors, they will all botch your HTML anywhere you make edits. RTF is basically "it just works," very much like "Microsoft Word Light."

Your complaint seems to be about the editors, not HTML.

Unless you're willing to write your own editor, that's not really a practical distinction

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#106

Post by everybodyknows »

Shog9 wrote: post #41
jorvi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like Commonmark but I wish it would have been more opinionated. They chose to allow two ways to do everything[0]. Making * always be used for bold and _ always for italicizing is so much clearer, and some Markdown flavors (notably WhatsApp) do this. So you only have to do *haha* or _haha_, which also makes italic-bold more _*intuitive*_. Similarly they should have gone with one style of headings, probably with #. T…

If you want strictness, use a linter or a pretty-printer that follows your preferred style. Adopting an opinionated parser means you can't lint or pretty-print input from those with different opinions (I do not like underscores for emphasis), and thus somewhat goes against the goals of TFA here: > Markdown files are essentially plaintext with some extra syntax for common elements like sections, bullet points, and lin…

> ... new version requires rewriting all previously-written documents to eliminate no-longer-supported syntax and re-training writers

Wonder if any of the LLMs could do that for you?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#107

Post by crossroadsguy »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…

RTF isn’t a better option than MD, plaintext is. We start with the premise that we are talking about plain text, as in plain text, texts. But pretty soon we are into colours, then maybe images and videos, and then what all not.

But MD still is closest to plaintext because in most cases MD (or a similar scheme), even when not rendered, can be read easily in its plaintext formatting.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#108

Post by voltaireodactyl »

normalaccess wrote: post #13

I love markdown and use it for all my notes, however it really needs a native way to underline. I have been converting some older books and lectures to markdown and underline is used all the time. If anyone has a good solution I'm all ears.

I love the Fountain spec for exactly this reason. I primarily began using it since it’s Markdown for screenwriting, but it has bold, underline, and italics along with the usual markdown stuff like comments etc. I find it to be by far the best way to write plaintext anything other than code. It’s also a bit more opinionated than Markdown which I highly prefer.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#109

Post by [deleted] »

inetknght wrote: post #101
hakaneskici wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.

> Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in Can you point me to a page in Firefox that I can use offline to WYSIWYG edit a hypertext document without needing to use the developer console to edit raw HTML?

[deleted]

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#110

Post by ajxs »

copperx wrote: post #88
nicoburns wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTML is also worth considering. It's not quite as nice to write in as Markdown, but it's still pretty reasonable to hand write (or even read if it comes to it).

Is this sarcasm? or are we coming back full circle unintentionally?

When I created the SSG I use for my blog, I tested a bunch of different markup formats for the article content, but in the end I settled on plain-old raw HTML. Over the years, I've needed to render so many different specific visual elements in the blog entries that if I wasn't actually using raw HTML, I'd probably be using raw HTML snippets all over the place anyway. For another medium I might choose a different markup format, but when it comes to writing content for the web, with HTML I know exactly what I'm getting every time.
Post reply on HN