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How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#191

Post by wiseowise »

astrange wrote: post #84
wiseowise wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how "worse is better" started to win > first Java over C++ ...really? Java was literally created to fix C++ issues. > then python and javascript over Java That's just different, not worse.

Java is based on Objective-C/Smalltalk, not on C++. It's strictly worse than its original too. There's a lot to be said for the rule of least power, but it's not nearly powerful enough.

It’s irrelevant what it is based on. Those are the words of James Gosling.

> It's strictly worse than its original too.

Tell me more of those exiting stories. I’d like to hear them.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#192

Post by xigoi »

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?

Off the top of my head: Math typesetting, semantic markup, small caps, document sectioning. (All of these things are very important for me.)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#193

Post by xigoi »

chrismorgan wrote: post #181
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…

> 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 r…

I’m pretty sure many Markdown implementations would turn this into a code block. Unfortunately Babelmark seems to currently be broken so I can’t test it.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#194

Post by xigoi »

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.

> That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

And that’s the main issue with Markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#195

Post by da_chicken »

zahlman wrote: post #123
da_chicken wrote: post #67

Earlier 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.

If XML dropped attributes and required everything to be an element -- which people always want to object to because they've used XML wrong their entire careers, but that's exactly what JSON did -- if they did that, and then also permitted `` as a universal close tag so that nesting isn't really a problem... which, again, is exactly what JSON did (and SGML)... then I think XML would not be so maligned. Like the problem with XML isn't that it wasn't capable. It's that it had too many features that actually aren't useful, and features that are distracting to the point of making people use it wrong.

Because almost the entirety of the remaining JSON ecosystem is just duplicating what XML did. We have JSON Path and JSON Query. We have JSON schema. There's even JSLT, although it didn't inherit the flaws of that XSLT library. About the only thing there still seems to be an argument about that XML did is JSON comments.

And, to be clear, JSON's perception as being better performing primarily comes from the fact that web browser developers had a vested interest in making JavaScript engines high performance for ordinary JavaScript, and they spent more effort on that than on their XML libraries simply because it was more important. That means the problem with the web hasn't been the use of XML. It's been the way we stapled half a dozen languages together to do one thing: display a document as a computer interface.

But if you use XML to the minimal level as JSON requires by it's nature, and if XML had gotten the performance interest that JavaScript did, then XML would be fine.

So I don't think JSON is better than XML. I think JSON just got lucky.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#196

Post by Ringz »

chrismorgan wrote: post #179
anildash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

“Markdown” is a family of writing formats. There is no one “Markdown”. It’s completely unsuitable for direct inclusion in the web platform. Related reading: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html text/markdown registration.

The overlap between these Markdown formats is actually larger than with many other formats. Possibly even larger than HTML’s overlap back when MS Explorer was the dominant browser.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#197

Post by xigoi »

reshlo wrote: post #127
baby_souffle wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s not just “extended” flavours of Markdown that allow embedding HTML. The original reference implementation supports this too.[0] > For any markup that is not covered by Markdown’s syntax, you simply use HTML itself. There’s no need to preface it or delimit it to indicate that you’re switching from Markdown to HTML; you just use the tags. [0] https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

However, there is no way to switch back to Markdown inside HTML, so if, say, you want to have an tag around your article, you need to write it entirely in HTML.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#198

Post by xigoi »

chuckadams wrote: post #60

The author of CommonMark and Pandoc has a new format called Djot: https://djot.net/ that I've been meaning to check out. Supposedly more sane to parse, and it comes from someone who would definitely know about that sort of thing.

I like it, but it doesn’t seem to have a specification, making it hard to create a new implementation.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#199

Post by atoav »

latexr wrote: post #18
atoav wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible . If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peese…

> opinionated Markdown is the opposite of opinionated; nearly everything in the original spec can be done in more than one way. There’s two separate syntaxes to do headers, links, italics, bold, and three ways to do unordered lists.

Let me explain what I meant with opinionated:

Markdown decided for the users what the needed formatting options are, instead of giving them a bunch of tools that they could then combine in many different ways. The latter would be unopinionated as it doesn't force the opinions of the devs onto the users.

For example, why doesn't markdown have columns? Why do tables have to have headers? Etc. The reason is someone decided to do it that way on purpose.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#200

Post by atoav »

pests wrote: post #32
atoav wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible . If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peese…

Markdown allows HTML to be mixed freely. Not all implementations allow it. But the whole point was allowing a fallback to HTML if Markdown couldn't do what you needed. So its not even an option of switching from MD to HTML/CSS, its just an addition when needed.

I know. And this was a good idea.
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