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How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#71

Post by eikenberry »

kazinator wrote: post #38
w10-1 wrote: post #6

This 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…

Java isn't worse than C++; it has a much more capable run-time, something which is left as an implementation-defined footnote in C++. Java had a leg-up over C++ by several decades in having a concurrency story (at all) in the language. I wouldn't use std:: anything for threads even in a greenfield C++ project today. Garbage collection is more advanced than the primitive management tools available in C++, like smart p…

> Java isn't worse than C++;

"Worse is better" is about simplicity vs expressibility tradeoffs, not an absolute better/worse value judgement. By saying Java is worse than C++ here the OP is only saying that Java is simpler (less expressible) than C++.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#72

Post by cbm-vic-20 »

sheept wrote: post #69
Johnny_Bonk wrote: post #62

I'm fairly new to all this, but my understanding is that Markdown is great for a few reasons: It's just plain text, so no vendor lock-in and you can ripgrep/fzf/grep through it Lives happily in git repos with proper diffs LLMs speak it natively - they output Markdown, they understand Markdown input Way easier for agents to parse than PDFs (which are binary, layout-focused, tables turn to mush) Can do tables (at least…

(CommonMark) Markdown is a rough superset of HTML, like how YAML is a superset of JSON. So whatever can be expressed in HTML can also be expressed in Markdown. With the way the CommonMark spec is written, Markdown is effectively just an HTML preprocessor. A major limitation of Markdown is the lack of standardization. For example, even within GFM there's multiple subtle variants: a single new line becomes a space when…

> whatever can be expressed in HTML can also be expressed in Markdown.

I suppose, since Commonmark specifically has HTML block and raw HTML inlines, any chunk of HTML is by definition valid Markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#73

Post by duskwuff »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #52

I think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.) I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of…

In the contexts where Markdown is most often used, the distinction between bold and italics isn't really important. So long as *this* or **this** gets rendered in a way that conveys emphasis, the meaning is preserved.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#74

Post by levmiseri »

> ...that it was too difficult or inconvenient to write out full HTML by hand

It's not necessarily that writing HTML or other markup flavors is harder (obviously it is), but the beauty of Markdown for me is that it's perfectly readable in its raw form as well as with an applied styling.

And speaking of customizing the 'look' of markdown, a shameless plug for a markdown editor I've been working on with extensive customization options: https://kraa.io/about

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#76

Post by anildash »

rkp8000 wrote: post #57

I love Markdown. I'm a bit surprised, though, that you still can't open a .md file by default in most web browsers. It seems like it should be quite trivial to have the browser automatically convert it to html and display it.

This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#77

Post by anildash »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #52

I think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.) I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of…

It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.

I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#78

Post by GuB-42 »

Havoc wrote: post #56

Sound write-up. It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. No format/vendor lock-in and very amenable to living in a git repo. For my note taking that's already game over right there against everything else. I don't want to worry about whatever cursed format OneNote uses is still something I can extract in 2035. I also like that it's become a defacto standard that LLMs speak. I can tell i…

Not only that but Markdown use the conventions people already used in text files (point 3 in the article). People wrote Markdown before Markdown existed, they just formalized it.

In fact, I like to write notes and documentation in text form, and then I notice I have been using Markdown all along, so I rename my text file into .md, fix a couple of markers, and now it looks nice on a viewer that supports markdown, and I have syntax highlighting in my text editor.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#79

Post by anildash »

akshayshah wrote: post #5

I 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 actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#80

Post by anildash »

swyx wrote: post #48

sharing my list of mistakes in markdown that Gruber endorsed :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22776108

I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about everything on your list. I just need you to travel back in time to tell me to fuss more!
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