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How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#111

Post by happyopossum »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #89
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.

As I was griping above, you usually can't just view a Markdown file with formatting applied at all. I think MAYBE Notepad has been updated just recently to render it, but otherwise... you're looking at plain text with a bunch of formatting characters in it. Why? It's baffling. Where are the simple Markdown READERS?

Your plain text editor is the markdown reader. That’s the point.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#112

Post by happyopossum »

morshu9001 wrote: post #101
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…

My "worse is better" is using plain text instead of markdown. I still have no idea how newlines work in markdown.

Newlines work in markdown the same way they do in plain text, because markdown is plain text.

If you have something that’s converting markdown into a rich view and it’s not doing that, the problem isn’t with markdown, it’s with your markdown parser.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#113

Post by happyopossum »

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #54

I think it's fitting that his attempt to emphasize "mark up " and "mark down " was foiled by his own blog's Markdown parser.

It wasn’t - elsewhere in comments here he mentioned that he wanted underscores, but gave up due to so many comments like yours.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#114

Post by nullhole »

happyopossum wrote: post #111
VerifiedReports wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I was griping above, you usually can't just view a Markdown file with formatting applied at all. I think MAYBE Notepad has been updated just recently to render it, but otherwise... you're looking at plain text with a bunch of formatting characters in it. Why? It's baffling. Where are the simple Markdown READERS?

Your plain text editor is the markdown reader. That’s the point.

It really would be nice to have a convenient renderer for it though. It's genuinely surprising something like firefox doesn't have a markdown reader builtin already.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#116

Post by baby_souffle »

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…

> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography,

Some "extended" flavors will allow you to embed HTML and CSS which solves the layout problem. It's not really markdown at that point, though.

> embedded binary content,

If you're using one of the extended variants, you can b64 encode images... but again, that's not really the spirit/intent of markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#117

Post by tombert »

GuB-42 wrote: post #78
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…

That's the main reason I still like writing Markdown (and Typst nowadays as well); I can "render" it in my head very quickly.

When I'm reading Markdown, I almost don't even see the symbols. Beginning a statement with a # immediately just looks like a heading, surrounding a word with asterisks looks italic to me, wrapping a string with backticks looks like code formatting to me, and my assumptions are generally right so I don't need to render very often (which is why the Pandoc -> LaTeX -> PDF pipeline didn't bother me that much).

If I'm writing LaTeX or something, I generally have a very rough idea of what something will look like, but it's not terribly reliable for me. I need to render frequently because my assumptions about how something is going to look is likely to be wrong.

I mostly use Typst now because it is similar enough to Markdown, and the compilation time is so categorically faster that I see little reason not to use it, but I still respect the hell out of Markdown for popularizing this kind of syntax.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#119

Post by Analemma_ »

anildash wrote: post #81
Analemma_ wrote: post #65

This is a good article, although I wish it had talked a little more about the standardization (or rather, the lack thereof) in Markdown. I get why it didn't, it's trying to be positive about something that is an overwhelming net positive for the world, but I think a "warts-and-all" treatment of the history would be more honest. I appreciate that Gruber brought this very helpful thing into the world, but OTOH he was s…

I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and document their own usage (or "flavors") ends up being Good Enough in actual practice. It sucks from a standpoint of what I personally find satisfying, to be clear. But based on what I've seen over the last 20+ years, it is the strategy that is muc…

Thanks for responding, Anil! Like I said, I really liked the article overall.

I don't agree that the Standard Markdown effort, had it succeeded as originally laid out, would've resulted in "hyper-corporate standardization". I mean, one of the main actors was Jeff Atwood, just about the least "hyper-corporate" guy there is. And I also don't really see any possible trajectory for Markdown to get "enshittified": after all, for the most part it's just plaintext with formatting conventions that existed way before it. Even if some corporate entity had somehow badly messed it up, markdown.pl and the other pre-existing implementations would have continued to exist.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#120

Post by esperent »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #87
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…

Except there's a massive lack of Markdown VIEWERS. You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. So you wind up looking at them as plain text, with a bunch of formatting characters in them. What's the point, then? Only just now has Windows Notepad been revised to render Markdown (I think it does now, anyway). And after searching for a Mac…

There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that.

Try copying some markdown into these places:

- A reddit comment

- Microsoft Teams

- Slack

- Whatsapp

- Discord

- Google Docs

- Discord

- Notion

- Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think)

Etc.

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