Markdown is holding you back • Hacker News Board

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#31

Post by tefkah » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 10:56 PM UTC

henrebotha wrote: post #29

dschuessler wrote: post #10

You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

There are real limitations to this: You can't arbitrarily mix and match HTML and Markdown. As soon as you introduce an HTML block, you're locked out of Markdown syntax. AsciiDoc lets you mix and match however you want. Or, put differently: AsciiDoc's superiority over Markdown extends even to being better at shelling out to HTML.

mdx does tho. you could just not define any components, then you can nest markdown inside html no problem

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#32

Post by WA » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 10:57 PM UTC

dardeaup wrote: post #18

This is a timely topic for me. I'm just beginning the writing of a technical book. I plan to target epub/mobi. My research thus far has pointed to markdown -> html -> epub/mobi. If you were going to write a technical ebook would you use markdown or an alternative?

You need:

- table of contents

- automatic chapter and section numbering

- cross references and automatic tracking of figures, tables etc.

- different styles besides blockquotes such as info sections, warnings, tips

Imho, cross-referencing chapters, pages, figures, tables and the lack thereof in Markdown is the first and most important thing to check how you would like this to be solved.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#33

Post by hadlock » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:00 PM UTC

nathias wrote: post #19

is this a poignant satire about programmers?

I went to look up and see if this guy was in his early to mid 20s when I got to this point

> That tag isn't Markdown at all; it's a React component.

Turns out he's in his 40s, so he lived through ms word, front page and the JavaScript wars; this is almost certainly satire

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#34

Post by vidarh » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC

henrebotha wrote: post #29

dschuessler wrote: post #10

You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

There are real limitations to this: You can't arbitrarily mix and match HTML and Markdown. As soon as you introduce an HTML block, you're locked out of Markdown syntax. AsciiDoc lets you mix and match however you want. Or, put differently: AsciiDoc's superiority over Markdown extends even to being better at shelling out to HTML.

While that's true, I'd take Markdown + extensions to allow inline HTML or custom tags over AsciiDoc any day, even at the cost of losing some compatibility - converting that to plain Markdown is usually easy enough.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#35

Post by dandersch » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:02 PM UTC

sroerick wrote: post #24

Org is pretty good.

org-mode could have had a chance if they had provided tooling outside the emacs ecosystem. But now LLMs have chosen markdown, so it's destined to forever remain an obscurity.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#36

Post by tefkah » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:03 PM UTC

nicoburns wrote: post #6

This article doesnt consider Typst, which IMO ought to be the first port of call if Markdown isnt sufficient for your needs.

typst is great, but there are many many steps between “markdown isn’t sufficient” and reaching for typst.

1. typst only really has pdf output at the moment 2. so much less tooling available (linters, site builders, converters etc) 3. much less of a markup format, extremely tightly coupled to a specific tool (typst compiler)

again, love typst, but it has (atm) so much fewer applications

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#37

Post by amitav1 » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:05 PM UTC

I use Org-mode w/ GNU Emacs for all of my blogging(shameless plug: amitav.net). I like Org-mode because it's easy enough to write, looks nice enough, can be exported in quite a few formats, and the code block handling is chef's kiss. It supports quite a few languages and has a feature I've seen in no other editor before, where you can chain together code from different code blocks, and evaluate it, inside of the document itself. I tried out a few different blogging platforms with first class Org-mode support ([Blorgit](https://orgmode.org/worg/blorgit.html) and [lazyblorg](https://karl-voit.at/tags/lazyblorg/)), but they ended up taking up a bunch of time to set up, so my current process is just manually exporting my Org files to HTML, then using rsync to send them over to my server, then I have a Ruby script which just appends an index to the bottom of each file and serves it. I find Org-mode a lot more expressive and natural to write than my previous blogs which were in Markdown.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#38

Post by tefkah » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

hadlock wrote: post #33

nathias wrote: post #19

is this a poignant satire about programmers?

I went to look up and see if this guy was in his early to mid 20s when I got to this point > That tag isn't Markdown at all; it's a React component. Turns out he's in his 40s, so he lived through ms word, front page and the JavaScript wars; this is almost certainly satire

i think that specific turn off phrase is more of an indicator of llm usage then age imo

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#39

Post by jppope » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

Been constantly using it for ~10 years and it works great. I read the article and its not incorrect, but its also kind of arguing that markdown users have problems that they themselves would say they don't have. If you need something else, use something else. With all that said, great title, they convinced me to waste ~3-5 min digging in.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#40

Post by nickledave » Sat, Nov 22, 2025, 11:18 PM UTC

Really weird to see this person mention MyST as a form of Markdown, and then go on to talk about reStructuredText as their first example of a markup language "that gives you more control over structure than ... markdown".

The whole point of MyST is to provide a markdown-like alternative to rST. It literally has directives, roles, structural semantics, etc. It just doesn't have the unlearnable syntax of rST and the so-called governance of docutils (the de facto rST parser) (see e.g. discussion on https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/8039 and linking issues)