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If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

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

#151

Post by cma »

nicoburns wrote: post #93
copperx wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's not sarcasm. HTML is and always has been a decent format for hand-authoring documents. It's not as nice to use as markdown, but it does support more advanced use cases like coloured text. And if you want an "archival" format that will stand the test of time it's pretty good (so long as your text encoding is readable, HTML will be).

versus markdown it is ungreppable with all the escape codes/entities, then you have to use special tooling for search.

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

#152

Post by sampo »

bflesch wrote: post #150
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…

Good point. I just noticed that RTF really looks a lot like LaTeX syntax - LaTeX was clearly inspired by it.

> LaTeX was clearly inspired by it

By initial release dates, LaTeX (1984) and TeX (1978) predate RTF (1987).

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

#153

Post by [deleted] »

bflesch wrote: post #150
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…

Good point. I just noticed that RTF really looks a lot like LaTeX syntax - LaTeX was clearly inspired by it.

[deleted]

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

#154

Post by labster »

1propionyl wrote: post #148
labster wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap. I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral tr…

If you’re going oral tradition, you might as well use repeatedly-compressed JPEG instead. Same quality but less space used by the storage devices.

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

bflesch wrote: post #150
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…

Good point. I just noticed that RTF really looks a lot like LaTeX syntax - LaTeX was clearly inspired by it.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by galkk »

Markdown is great, but not a panacea.

Tables, in particular, just suck, especially if you want to have even slight formatting inside of the cells.

Unfortunately, it’s either plain-text-readable or rich representation. Pick your poison.

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

#157

Post by zimpenfish »

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…

I remember, a long time ago, having to try and parse text out from RTF documents and I would rather have every internal organ pecked out by sparrows than try and deal with that abomination again.

> still text-based

The point about Markdown is that you don't need a complex parser[0] to be able to interpret the files - a simple human can read a Markdown file and get the gist of what is going on. RTF has a whole mess of control strings and codes going on that get in the way of a simple visual understanding.

> I can't express simple formatting such as "make this text red" in Markdown.

You can add raw HTML to Markdown which would accomplish this (at the expense of moving away from the "simple plain text", obvs.) There's a bunch of Markdown parsers with extensions for this kind of thing though (from what I can see, they're all not entirely "simple" either which is a shame.)

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

#158

Post by DidYaWipe »

galkk wrote: post #156

Markdown is great, but not a panacea. Tables, in particular, just suck, especially if you want to have even slight formatting inside of the cells. Unfortunately, it’s either plain-text-readable or rich representation. Pick your poison.

The biggest problem with Markdown is the baffling lack of plain VIEWERS. Not editors with a preview pane, but straight-up viewers that render Markdown for reading.

There are very, very few. I use Marked 2, for Mac. I don't even remember if I ever found another one. It's irritating as hell, because pretty much every open-source project's read-me files are in Markdown. Why, when there is no viewer anywhere near as ubiquitous as those for PDF... despite Markdown being much simpler and better understood?

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

#159

Post by DidYaWipe »

geokon wrote: post #139

It feels like a long term solution would be to use a markdown that is both easy to write (not RTF or XHTML), but has a defined grammar in some standard format (ex: EBNF). Most platform/languages will have a parser and so you can whip up a "renderer" or converter trivially at any point. The only markup I'm finding with a grammar is MediaWiki (sort of..) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec Even Djot doesn't seem…

"so you can whip up a "renderer" or converter trivially at any point"

And yet almost no one has...

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

#160

Post by DidYaWipe »

jon_richards wrote: post #36

The killer app for markdown would be a collaborative editor that displays the raw markdown and formatted markdown side-by-side and makes both sides editable. Tech people can use `#` and `*` on one side for formatting, product people can use normal text-editor buttons like "header1", "italics", etc.

Or just a plain VIEWER.
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