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How Markdown took over the world

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#201

Post by zdc1 »

duskdozer wrote: post #188
mcny wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Then you need to re-pad everything (clean looking git diff be damned). It's just the reality of dealing with bounding boxes. Maybe we don't notice it in HTML and such since the browser redraws them for us for free.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#202

Post by xigoi »

walterbell wrote: post #14

What's preventing browsers from rendering a common subset of markdown without the need for browser extensions, with fallback to the current default of plaintext if parsing fails? LLM output can be copy-pasted for rendering by chat messengers and notetaking apps (e.g. DevonThink). If LLM markdown output continues to proliferate, does it become the defacto common-by-volume subset of Markdown, which browsers could stand…

There is no such thing as a common subset of Markdown. Even basic things are rendered inconsistently by different implementations. If browsers decided to add Markdown support, this would lead to another “works only in Internet Explorer” situation.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#203

Post by quintu5 »

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…

Markdown viewing is one of the core use-cases I had in mind when building the Tachi Code browser extension (https://tachicode.com/).

Open a raw .md file in your browser and it'll automatically open in a side-by-side editor/preview. If viewing is all you want, you can set the default preview mode for markdown files to be fullscreen.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#204

Post by cdmckay »

xigoi wrote: post #190
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.)

You could still support a subset of the most common features like bold, italic, strike, bullets, links, etc.

Isn’t the beauty of MD supposed to be that if you can’t render it it should still look fine as plaintext?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#205

Post by xigoi »

cdmckay wrote: post #204
xigoi wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You could still support a subset of the most common features like bold, italic, strike, bullets, links, etc. Isn’t the beauty of MD supposed to be that if you can’t render it it should still look fine as plaintext?

Even these basics are not consistent. See my Markdown Monster:

https://git.sr.ht/~xigoi/markdown-monster/blob/master/monste...

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#206

Post by matijsvzuijlen »

nullhole wrote: post #114
happyopossum wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wrote one for my own use (on Linux): https://github.com/mvz/mdv

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#207

Post by xigoi »

morshu9001 wrote: post #103
calmbonsai wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was immersed in C++ from the original Stroustrup book (I do not recommend it), then transitioned to Java, then (largely) to Python I disagree on the language comparison. - Java is not worse than C++, it's actually better for most large-scale programming - A (subset) of C++ is still far better for performance-intensive applications (games, low-level systems software, avionics, etc.). - Related to previo…

IMO JS and its spinoffs made mostly the best choices for an interpreted language. The bad parts are pretty inconsequential, and the good parts are important things other langs didn't do well. Even Rust took after how it does async and package management. Better than Python which also recently started copying over JS decisions, except that Py was easier to use with C libs from the start which made it capture math/data…

I would certainly not consider package management to be a good part of JavaScript (or Rust, for that matter).

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#208

Post by physicles »

zeppelin101 wrote: post #105
VerifiedReports wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm personally a huge fan of Typora. It's available on Windows, MacOS and Linux.

Typora is the best markdown authoring experience out there, even surpassing obsidian imho. I wish I could use it every time I interact with markdown.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#209

Post by teaearlgraycold »

tombert wrote: post #117
GuB-42 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don’t even see the code. I see a blonde, brunette, red head.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#210

Post by somat »

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…

That is the point, markdown has nice looking plain text, It is a terrible formatting language, it has no semantic ability. The whole point of markdown is that it is nice looking plaintext that can be typeset. I would even go so far to say that the intended primary render of markdown is the plaintext

This is why I don't like proposals to make markdown a better markup language, I understand the intent, markdown sucks as a decent language, but these "improvements" make the plain text ugly, and that is most of the value of markdown lost right there.

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