291–300 of 353 posts
Shameless plug, I’m writing the book on how to publish YOUR book with Markdown. https://www.48hourpress.com/publish-with-markdown/
Just joined your Early Reader's list. I've already self-published a novel written partially in Markdown, and starting work on another, so I'm anxious to see what you have to say!
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.
The funny thing is that HTML was supposed to be a markup language that could be read/written by hand, while making it also machine-to-machine friendly - notably by making some "semantic" features accessible for browsers. One of these for instance is the structure of the document; marking section headers was supposed to let browser to automatically generate a table of contents. Additionally CSS was supposed to let use…
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…
If you only use headlines and bulletpoints, I have a very pleasing result for a simple text file.
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“LLM generated Markdown” is not a coherent description of a language. LLMs can generate anything they have seen in their training data, which includes many incompatible dialects of Markdown.
Major LLMs (e.g. ChatGPT) have a copy button for their output, yielding markdown that is already being consistently rendered by other apps, reflecting what was consistently rendered as HTML. Presumably LLM vendors have built a deterministic way of generating spec-compliant HTML and their well-defined dialect of Markdown, otherwise their chat UI output would not render consistently.
Both ASCIIdoc and reStructured text are older and better (subjective, of course), yet Markdown still won. Happens sometimes, nothing to see, I've moved on (with just a little grumbling). Now I often can't remember their syntaxes anymore, Markdown is everywhere.
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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.
A reasonable format would not insist you lay out tables visually any more than it would insist you center your headers if you'd like them horizontally centered when rendered. For instance, Asciidoctor has syntax for table cells that requires no whitespace and lets you put any content at all in a cell.
No doubt some janky one exists somewhere, but nobody uses that.
I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)
I added Markdown support to Google Docs as a 20% project. Honestly honored to be included in this Markdown history :)
I use this feature DAILY at work, you built something great here. I tend to write in md locally, this makes sharing the work with others easy. Especially to those less plaintext inclined. One thing I did notice, I can't seem to find a way to set a default codeblock font format. The default font option isn't totally monospaced and so some ascii art looks weird :/ I don't think that has anything to do with your contrib…
Sorry to hear about the font issue. I'm no longer at Google, but going to forward to some friends who still work there (no guarantee anything changes, but we'll see!)
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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…
> Not only that but Markdown use the conventions people already used in text files 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 the…
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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…
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.