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Markdown is holding you back

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Re: Markdown is holding you back

#91

Post by judahmeek »

vidarh wrote: post #34
henrebotha wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What are the trade-offs with AsciiDoc that would make you choose Markdown instead?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#92

Post by littlestymaar »

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

> I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this.

Reddit surely doesn't, and I'd be very surprised if github did.

In practice, in any place you want untrusted users writing markdown stuff for formatting, you cannot allow arbitrary HTML for security reasons.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#93

Post by jillesvangurp »

The main point of Markdown is that it has a very important feature that other languages don't have: it's supported in a lot of places. Most of the alternatives mentioned in this thread or in the article are things that require custom tools, that can't be used in most of the places that currently do support markdown. It's common in a lot of places. Even Google Docs has a well hidden feature that allows you to paste markdown.

It's one of those good enough things where the things it doesn't do are outweighed by the notion that you can just use it pretty much everywhere.

It's a Betamax vs VHS type discussion (both are at this point obsolete and forgotten). HTML used to be pretty limited as well compared to things like SGML or any of the wonderful things people used for structured documentation in the eighties. Most of which are long forgotten. It still is pretty limited compared to those probably. But the point with HTML is that that's what browsers supported and not other formats. Many of the limitations were addressed over time.

Markdown could be improved in a similar way over time. We have ambiguous standardization, lack of features, mutually incompatible implementations, etc. The whole thing actually resembles HTML4 before people started addressing such concerns. Evolving Markdown seems like the easier path than replacing it with something else.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#94

Post by f1shy »

mettamage wrote: post #89
jimmar wrote: post #5

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great. For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me. But in the end, no markup language will make you write bette…

LaTeX made me write better because of commenting above every paragraph.

What LaTeX helped me with was in taking more care of the content than the form/appearance.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#95

Post by myaccountonhn »

amitav1 wrote: post #37

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 doc…

Org mode is unfortunately really tied to Emacs and so featureful that I imagine it's hard to port elsewhere. Maybe if an LSP gets built for it we'd start see it elsewhere.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#96

Post by mangecoeur »

hobofan wrote: post #72
jimmar wrote: post #5

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great. For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me. But in the end, no markup language will make you write bette…

Yes, the author conflates two different use-cases. Markdown is the answer for "how do we enable people that don't want to invest a lot of time into producing content that's somewhat better than plain text?". It's not trying to solve the problem of "how do we enable people that are willing to invest time into learning to produce the best possible and most structured content possible?" and I doubt that there will be la…

The problem in practice is that quickly one merges into the other. You start with a markdown readme, then you have markdown documentation for a small project. But then one day you need full documentation for your project with cross links, translations, accessibility. With Markdown you end up bolting these things on and each flavor does it a bit differently.

Perhaps some of the blame can be laid with the poor UX of technically superior systems. restructuredtext (apart from the terrible name) built with Spinx can do impressive things but becomes a huge pain to configure. All the XML-based tools like DocBook are very complete but try to get started actually building something - apart from having to author them in XML (which is already a kind of punishment), then you have to figure out XSLT stylesheets, 2000s-era design Java tools for processing them. And just look at the DocBook landing page! AsciiDoc has improved their onboarding recently but does have the issue of feeling like a markdown-ish alternative that's just a bit different for no clear reason.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#97

Post by gen2brain »

littlestymaar wrote: post #92
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

> I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. Reddit surely doesn't, and I'd be very surprised if github did. In practice, in any place you want untrusted users writing markdown stuff for formatting, you cannot allow arbitrary HTML for security reasons.

I often use with "width" on GitHub, so that I do not have the scrollbars on the main page, and one can click on the image to see the original size. It is ugly, but what is the alternative in Markdown? Several images instead of one?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#98

Post by euroderf »

throwaway150 wrote: post #49
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

> You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them. That is well known and I am sure the author is aware of it. The problem they are describing is not whether HTML is technically allowed inside Markdown. It's that when you are writing Markdown, you are writing Markdown, not HTML, and that comes with some problems. > It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. In theory, yes.…

> why bother with Markdown at all?

Maybe it's an 80-20 thang ? Your page is mostly MD that's easy on the eyes, but with "shelling out" for semantics like section or aside ?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#100

Post by euroderf »

undeveloper wrote: post #15
jimmar wrote: post #5

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great. For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me. But in the end, no markup language will make you write bette…

typst looks interesting -- but how are you writing it? from what I looked at, it looks like theres an official web editor and a vscode plugin with limited support. this feels pretty limited, as someone who came in expecting something like obsidian.

Typst really does look good. Can one get an editor with live PDF preview ? It would be useful mainly for immediate feedback on markup correctness; then an HTML output ought to be "close enough".
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