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How Markdown took over the world

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#181

Post by chrismorgan »

lelanthran wrote: post #148
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, 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…

> Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

Not so. You just need to be principled with your indentation, adding four spaces or one tab for every level of nesting.

  1. Here is a thing.

      - See, it works.

          Nothing is amiss.

  2.  If you want to align everything…

      -   Then it looks like this.

          Then it doesn’t seem so weird.
(You can leave or remove the two spaces of HN code formatting; zero to three spaces don’t matter.)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#182

Post by chrismcb »

christophilus wrote: post #70
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…

Same. I’m reading The UNIX Programming Environment (1984), and it’s made me want to use text for a lot more things. Proprietary formats come and go, but text is forever.

Provided you know the byte format of the text.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#183

Post by chrismorgan »

childintime wrote: post #173
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Djot is great. I use it in my project ( client for https://timbran.org/moor.html ). It has all that I needed from markdown without any excess, and it's safe and easy to parse and familiar to people.

Without the excess? From the site: > Straight double quotes (") and single quotes (') are parsed as curly quotes I don't know who actually likes curly quotes, they are clearly excess to me. And as parsing sometimes fails (as the site says it may), you get inconsistent results, and failures stick out like a sore thumb. Here is another syntax: this is . Very unlikely to clash, can be vibe coded in an hour. But it's mor…

> I don't know who actually likes curly quotes

For reading, I don’t know who prefers straight quotes.

For writing—

There are more than a few people on HN who deliberately type curly quotes and other non-ASCII punctuation, due to a strong preference for them. I’m one of them.

I use Compose sequences: ; ; for left single quote, : : for left double, ' ' for right single, " " for right double.

(Accordingly, I hate being subjected to automatic curlification, partly because it’s not always correct, but more because if I typed ' or " you better believe I meant ' or ".)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#184

Post by spiderfarmer »

rtpg wrote: post #158
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…

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

Bbcode. But that required tags like [b] and [i] so was just HTML light.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#185

Post by sixtyj »

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…

Obsidian is on Mac too. And it has live preview of md.

https://obsidian.md/download

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#187

Post by Peteragain »

The original idea was there with html 1.0. The lesson we needed to learn was that some think you can't sell stuff to do things if doing them is simple. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

Perhaps md is an opportunity to re invent the web: a browser for just md AND a search engine with an open algorithm that indexes just what is visible.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#188

Post by duskdozer »

mcny wrote: post #171
raincole wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fundamentally ok-ishly looking text. I think that is the biggest reason why Markdown doesn't support table. There are alternatives that do (e.g. wikitext) but they didn't get as popular as Markdown. Why? Perhaps it's because that tables will never really look fine in pure text no matter how clever your syntax is.

Sorry but I don't understand Isn't this a table? |sn|name| |--|--| |1|George| |2|John| I feel like I've been doing this at least since about 2013? Edit: I get it now. It was not a part of the original spec. |sn|name | |--|------| | 1|George| | 2|John | It can look better if we use fixed width font and add padding I guess?

It can, the gripe that I don't have a good solution for is what happens when entry 3 is a 7-letter name?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#190

Post by xigoi »

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.

That would require Markdown to be standardized. (There is the CommonMark standard, but it’s extremely complex and still ambiguous.)
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