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How Markdown took over the world

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#161

Post by lelanthran »

kstrauser wrote: post #156
lelanthran wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>> The average person does not want to render code.

> I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked

Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/

Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#162

Post by jkrejcha »

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.

Two spaces before the newline for a new line, two lines for a paragraph break

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#163

Post by amazingman »

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…

Single-asterisk for bold is not Markdown. I believe Slack calls their thing "markup". I also find it annoying. So annoying that I just learned Slack's keyboard shortcuts instead.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#164

Post by kstrauser »

lelanthran wrote: post #161
kstrauser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>> The average person does not want to render code. > I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/ Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

I don’t follow. Marked definitely isn’t a programming tool. There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code. That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#165

Post by lelanthran »

kstrauser wrote: post #164
lelanthran wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> The average person does not want to render code. > I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/ Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

I don’t follow. Marked definitely isn’t a programming tool. There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code. That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

> There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code.

Yes there is. The Common Mark spec, from 2014, says 4+ spaces indents are code. Nested lists go beyond 4+ indents pretty fast.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#166

Post by kittikitti »

A brown bag I did almost a decade ago informed some fellow developers about Markdown. Almost all of them dismissed it and confided that they didn't think it would catch on. Once again, I'm glad the gatekeepers are communicating this, one less humiliation ritual.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#167

Post by morshu9001 »

happyopossum wrote: post #112
morshu9001 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't though. Newline in the input doesn't create a newline in the output.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#168

Post by encrypted_bird »

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…

A lot of the responses to your comment imo are kinda missing your point. I don't use Apple products, but I do understand what you're saying. You want an editor that also has an option for previewing the markup text in its formatted view.

It's officially only available for Linux (the Windows version is currently under development), and like I said, I don't use Apple products, and idk how familiar you are with manually compiling source code or how good Wine is on Macs, but maybe [Remarkable](https://remarkableapp.github.io/) could be an option?

Just thought I'd give my $2.70. ;)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#169

Post by rabf »

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…

`glow` is a pretty handy terminal mardown viewer.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#170

Post by seymores »

Found myself needing to read a lot of MD docs and wanted to read them quickly in the terminal. didn't find any light, so I whipped one up quickly with Codex.

It's a TUI md reader, fast and cheap on the memory, because of Rust. Give it a try if you find yourself wanting a quick MD reader in a terminal.

https://github.com/seymores/mdr

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