Markdown vs HTML is a fine illustration of what humans consider to be natural and intuitive is anything but to a computer.
How Markdown took over the world
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Re: How Markdown took over the world
#22I'm a big fan of markdown, it's easy enough to remember the basic syntax and your files are portable across hundreds of different editors. If one day I decide to switch away from Obsidian, I can just plug the same files into another good editor.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#23Re: How Markdown took over the world
#24I like Markdown, and generally agree that it strikes a nice balance between correctness and usability... ...but it's delicious that this blog post also demonstrates an ambiguity in Markdown: how to handle intra-word emphasis. In the rendered output, "mark_up_" and "mark_down_" were probably intended to be "mark up " and "mark down ", but the underscores were instead rendered literally. I do appreciate that Markdown's…
I think it's delicious how nobody, absolutely nobody, wants _ to mean "emphasis," they want italics , and yet despite there being a markdown-to-HTML build step nobody has ever done what they were told they were supposed to do to circumvent the semantic issue and use instead of . It wouldn't even make sense for markdown if it were language-agnostic to output when that's HTML-only. I'm going to go to my grave repeating…
Ahem. Org mode user here. _ means underline :-)
Emphasis/italics is using /
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#25This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…
Let's not forget org-mode.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#26Buried in here the mention of Textile. IYKYK. Joyent. TextDrive. Textpattern CMS. Imagining an alternate universe where it might have been Textile. https://textile-lang.com/ Really it comes down to historically the time and place when Markdown was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.
Fun fact: For my first SW job I had to develop a site for a bunch of academics, and they wanted a way to enter rich text. I suggested textile, and they loved it. At the time, Markdown was not more popular, and I thought textile had the better syntax (it may also have had better library support).
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#27Re: How Markdown took over the world
#28Re: How Markdown took over the world
#29Just waiting Google Workspace create a Markdown Document Editor and Viewer.
Chatgpt is pushing markdown to the maximum expose, Google & Microsoft sooner or later should react.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#30This is good and detailed, but misses a broader trend: how "worse is better" started to win - first Java over C++, then python and javascript over Java, and here markdown over Word and docbook. When markdown emerged, docbook was getting even more elaborate, and vendors everywhere had for decades been locking people into frameworks and languages with fantastic features that were hard to use -- and then the internet bu…
The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible . If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peese…
> For example while docbook may have some technical
https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/
I wrote the feature matrix to objectively compare plain text-based documentation formats. How do DocBook's features compare against Markdown?