Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The problem for web browsers is that markdown is technically a superset of HTML.
How Markdown took over the world
241–250 of 353 posts
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#242I still prefer WYSIWYG.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#243I know what I want, ffs. And I don't want html
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#244If you ever hear any of that, don't listen to it. Just use Markdown. If you're building a messaging system or an announcement system instead of a fully fledged CMS - YAGNI/KISS. Or pick anything other than HTML, even BBCode.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
A more intuitive norm, used in other formats, would have been : *bold* /italics/ _underline_
+strikeout+ ~code/monospace~ _subscript * Heading ** Heading 2 ** Heading 3 - bullet - [1/2] checklist summary - [ ] unchecked item - [X] checked item And so much more... I see you, mlok, you fellow person of culture :)
-strikeout-
`code`
and bloody leave "-" as a dash. I so hate that it gets transformed into a dot for "bullet enthusiasts"
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#246The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of…
I am not sure (of course), but I think Atwood simply thought standardizing this format was so obviously valuable that he didn't consider Gruber might not want to work with him. In retrospect it's kind of nice that it didn't happen, it really keeps everyone incentivized to keep the format simple.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
n.b.: the above quote is from The Matrix.
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#248I'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…
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#249I'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…
indented code blocks are leaf blocks, while lists are containers that take precedence
Re: How Markdown took over the world
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
The problem for web browsers is that markdown is technically a superset of HTML.