Made an api client based on executable markdown : https://voiden.md/ .
How Markdown took over the world
151–160 of 353 posts
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#152Sound 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…
> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers
Huh? Any open-source project on GitHub, at least, has the viewer right there. It's the default view of markdown files. I assume other repos are similar.
E.g. The readme https://github.com/jquery/jquery
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#153This 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…
You've pretty much said what I was going to say. I think John was absolutely inspired in coming up with Markdown, but was a terrible steward. Or perhaps I should say he was unwilling to steward it.
My impression was he pretty much threw up a Perl implementation that was good enough for what he wanted, refused to refine it at all, and declared by the power vested in him by nobody in particular that if any parser implementation differed in behaviour to his (like, to fix bugs or make it better), wasn't true Markdown and wasn't allowed to be called Markdown.
Or perhaps I am being uncharitable in my interpretation of events.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#154Sound 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…
[deleted]
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#155markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse; there are so many ambiguities; CommonMark is so complex because of that and still has so many ambiguities. it's like YAML: it looks so simple at first, and then the horrors start if you try to use it seriously. in both cases the most horrors lie in the spaces/tabs/newlines.
> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse... I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use . Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users , even if it means making things harder for ourselves. After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.
That is true, modern HTML is also (from what I heard!) hard to parse.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#156I'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, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering. Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about? Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line. This is a serious and major drawback of markdown, making it goo…
That's a "feature" of a specific renderer. I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked, and both kept rendering each line as regular text.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#157Markdown took over because GitHub decided it should, instead of picking ASCIIDoc which is a better format, has a standard, and is literally used by the git documentation itself.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#158Sound 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…
I mean markdown existed, but before that there's like... whatever format phpbb and friends let you use for forum posts right? There was stuff that was text-y.
But perhaps it was the first big format that was followed a Unix-y "here's a CLI tool to go to HTML from this" thing, instead of some php script
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to look at Java and not see it as a transitional language now. Electron, Node, and even .Net have fundamentally been more successful implementing ideas that first saw widespread adoption in Java. JSON is basically XML, which is what Java pushed so hard for for data exchange instead of really gross binary serialization formats. Although, Java wasn't really trying to compete with C++ everywhere. It's just tha…
> JSON is basically XML, which is what Java pushed so hard for for data exchange instead of really gross binary serialization formats. JSON over XML is more of a "better is better" case, though.
I couldn't possibly agree more. I remember the first time I saw JSON over HTTP. Within a week, I started ripping out all the SOAP code I'd written because "that's what you're supposed to use". JSON plus a few standard verbs is better than the old XML web services in every way.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
(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…
It's enormously frustrating that there has been no standardization of the core base-level Markdown elements. If you allow Markdown input you have to give a cheatsheet showing which "flavor" you are using.
That’s because Gruber shut down the effort to standardize markdown. He declined to participate and then demanded that “Standard Markdown” be shut down when it went public. This is what yielded CommonMark.
https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
So we are left in the mode where markdown remains needlessly fractured. Different flavors that render slightly different and everyone gets a little annoyed but they deal with it ands occasionally bemoan the fact that there’s no standardization.