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There's loads of markdown viewers, you just don't identify them as that. Try copying some markdown into these places: - A reddit comment - Microsoft Teams - Slack - Whatsapp - Discord - Google Docs - Discord - Notion - Facebook Messenger (although only on desktop I think) Etc.
Matrix, Discourse. I wish that Signal supported it though.
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> 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 deci…
Tables don’t have to have headers in Markdown. It doesn’t even have tables to begin with! Not in the original specification which still exists. But there are certain flavours of Markdown which add support for tables, and those may or may not require headers. Each flavour implements features of Markdown as it see fit, and those may or not exist in other flavours or be implemented differently.
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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…
Are there any ways to type email in markdown? Never thought of it so far...
> ...that it was too difficult or inconvenient to write out full HTML by hand It's not necessarily that writing HTML or other markup flavors is harder (obviously it is), but the beauty of Markdown for me is that it's perfectly readable in its raw form as well as with an applied styling. And speaking of customizing the 'look' of markdown, a shameless plug for a markdown editor I've been working on with extensive custo…
I saw Kraa when you posted it here on HN, and decided to give it another go, even though I remembered that I dismissed it quickly the first time.
I only got shy beyond the first line -- Kraa breaks words anywhere to wrap to the next line, really a no go for me, at least in Markdown (it's different if I enable word-wrap in my code editor).
Played around a little more and the editing experience is not great (for my needs):
- Kraa hides '#', so I can't remove the header style from headers. The context menu does not offer to change to paragraph style. - Kraa uses non-standart '[]' for tasks, instead of the more common '- [ ]' and '- [x]'.
Slick UI, sure. However if I cannot edit Markdown, I don't consider it a Markdown editor. Like Notion is also not a Markdown editor, even if I can type '# ' to get a heading.
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…
It's completely inadequate for anything more than a memo or simple single-page note. Which is fine for many purposes a typical software developer encounters but quickly gets left behind for anything more.
It's exclusively a markup language, completely lacking in semantic meaning. If you're trying to write an actual document, the title is the title not some bold text in a bigger font, for example.
Like a hammer, it's a great tool for certain jobs. So many people assume all their writing tasks are nails.
I think there is another article waiting to be written, why ReStructured Text lost. I know that in my younger years I would get a lot of flak for converting .rst files into .md when I joined projects. (As I got older I just stopped seeing .rst that much)
It's a shame because reST is almost as easy on the eyes as Markdown and is much more capable without being too much more complex.
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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?
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.)
It'll certainly make some people angry, but if we try to please everyone we can't get anything done. And I suspect that it is the fear of not being able to please everyone that is the reason browsers do not have markdown support. It takes a bit of courage to say "this is the variant we'll implement".
HTML was originally said to be an application of SGML. It wasn't. It was vaguely inspired by its syntax and that is the only reason HTML saw wide adoption. Had they tried to actually implement anything close to ISO 8879:1986 we would NOT have adopted HTML for the web. Mostly because it would have been too costly to implement. (Anyone doubting that: have a look at the ISO standard. You can get it in what is essentially annotated form in Charles Goldfarb's "The HTML Handbook").
Of course, Markdown is nowhere near as complex. So this is where perfect is the enemy of good and we end up getting nothing.
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…
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…
So why not Markup? At the time, everyone was using markup because Wikipedia was in wikimarkUP, with # for numbered lists, {} for macros and === to denominate titles. The latter still works in Markdown, but the former doesn’t. Funny heritage: Confluence shortcuts are also expressed in markup because it was the trend at the time, but they changed the shortcuts when they went to the Cloud.