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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

#201

Post by lukeschlangen »

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.

I like this approach and I’m thinking I might agree. I’ve been starting with Markdown, but find myself going to HTML. At some point I end up wanting some specific thing that isn’t supported by Markdown so I need to leave Markdown for embedding a video or adding a tiny bit of interactivity (like show/hide), so sticking with HTML throughout is nice.

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

#202

Post by tqwhite »

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it.

I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year.

Now that disks are big, I keep a lot of old stuff. I have, eg, screenshots dating back to 2015. Email before then. And so so much more.

I have never gone back more than a few years.

I will continue to archive because I must but, Old Person to Young People... Don't put too much effort into long term availability. It's not a good investment.

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

#203

Post by ytjohn »

jorams wrote: post #167
hartator wrote: post #24

The only drawback of Markdown is images. GitHub-flavored Markdown is so popular because you can really easy inline them. You don't have to worry about storing them, linking them correctly, and you can even paste to the Markdown field. There is no elegant solution like this in actual Markdown.

> The only drawback of Markdown is images. > GitHub-flavored Markdown is so popular because you can really easy inline them. I'm not sure what you mean. GitHub-flavored Markdown has pretty much exactly the same image syntax as every other Markdown flavor.

I think they're mixing the GH web ui with the syntax. You can paste an image right into the editor and it does a really good job of inserting it right where you need to. It is really good UX that I miss when editing markdown locally. Obsidian also does a decent job, but not quite as smooth.

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

#205

Post by ekanes »

tqwhite wrote: post #202

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it. I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year. Now that disks are…

Similar perspective, but I'd offer a minor tweak. Just as before gmail people spent a lot of time "managing" their email. Gmail allowed us to stop bothering and just use search to find stuff among the now-messy volume of email. It works pretty well.

Similarly, I'd say save everything, but spend no time on organizing it, relying on search and ai/future technology to find what you want from among the mess.

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

#206

Post by dredmorbius »

alpaca128 wrote: post #176
dredmorbius wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is often, and was originally intended for, HTML generation. But that's not the only target which can be achieved, particularly with such tools as Pandoc, a document format interchange Swiss Army knife. Relying on format-specific tags imposes stronger constraints on endpoints and/or increases complexity of your document build process.

Inline HTML is part of the standard Markdown syntax, not a complication. If your tool doesn't support HTML it doesn't support Markdown. The format can be so simple in the first place because it allows this escape hatch for anything non-trivial. And tools like Pandoc can handle that just fine.

My point is that Markdown conversion tools, notably Pandoc, whilst they will incorporate inline HTML when generating HTML endpoints will not convert such inlined code to other endpoints, e.g., LaTeX, DocBook, OpenDocument, etc.

If you want those outputs to faithfully represent formatting, you either need to juggle multiple inline directives for each desired output format, or find some universal Markdown-based mechanism for achieving the same result.

I'd like to make clear that I'm familiar with Markdown; the fact that its original design intent was streamlining HTML generation; that inline "native" code is a feature, not a but, but all the same a rather fraught one; and that actual practice has moved far beyond Markdown merely being used to generate HTML, least of all my own such practice.

I've discussed this situation previously on HN (ironically from the PoV of using LaTeX embeds within Markdown creating problems when attempting to generate other-than-LaTeX outputs), see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29690056> (2021).

And I'd asked about the HTML and/or LaTeX conditional generation in a StackOverflow post about seven years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4820502a9/pandoc-have-ei...>.

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

#207

Post by TroubledTrumpet »

immibis wrote: post #195
tmountain wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad you found something that works for you, but it’s barely a text format from my vantage point. Parsing it is downright user hostile.

Parsing Markdown is downright everything-hostile. Computers and humans alike.

Can you expand on why you think reading plain markdown is hostile? For the vast majority of my Obsidian vault, I could open the markdown file in Notepad and it would be just about as readable as it is in the editor. Of course, you lose the visual effect of the styling, but it's still perfectly legible.

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

#208

Post by infecto »

ekanes wrote: post #205
tqwhite wrote: post #202

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it. I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year. Now that disks are…

Similar perspective, but I'd offer a minor tweak. Just as before gmail people spent a lot of time "managing" their email. Gmail allowed us to stop bothering and just use search to find stuff among the now-messy volume of email. It works pretty well. Similarly, I'd say save everything, but spend no time on organizing it, relying on search and ai/future technology to find what you want from among the mess.

Similar thought after many years of trying to be "organized". Search is what matters, make sure the tool or format of storage allows for easy searching.

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

#209

Post by datadrivenangel »

tqwhite wrote: post #202

Also, as an old person, I will tell you that 1) I got my first personal computer in 1979 and have been trying to keep my bon mots archived ever since. I have tried a million things and have learned one key lesson: It's not really worth it. I literally have a footlocker filled with old disk drives (remember, since 1979!) and I have never, ever gone back more than a few years, hell, more than a year. Now that disks are…

A triage system is essential to determining your archival strategy! We can produce information faster than we can produce information storage systems, so we need to be discerning! Random gibberish is less valuable than a screenshot you took in 2015, and that screenshot from a decade ago is probably less valuable than your tax returns or your treatise on the meaning of life! If it's worth keeping, it's worth putting some time into every few years to make sure it's copied somewhere.

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

#210

Post by lou1306 »

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…

> They either degrade

Much more slowly and gracefully than any digital medium we have concocted so far (save for core rope memory, maybe).

> even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community [...] translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext

This pertains to the message and not the support; also, I'll take missing subtext over missing text any day of the week, thank you very much.

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