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How Markdown took over the world

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#301

Post by eikenberry »

kazinator wrote: post #83
eikenberry wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Java isn't worse than C++; "Worse is better" is about simplicity vs expressibility tradeoffs, not an absolute better/worse value judgement. By saying Java is worse than C++ here the OP is only saying that Java is simpler (less expressible) than C++.

Nope; worse is better is about simplicity versus correctness tradeoffs. I've read the P. Gabriel essay enough times that I can rely on my memory of it. Like whether to hide interrupted system calls, or punt the responsibility for restarting them to the application. (That "PC loser-ing problem" example used in the essay). Between C++ and Java, it is hard call, but I would say that the Java ecosystem values correctness…

This is of course Correct (pun intended)... but IMO the underlying meaning of correctness was a correctness of the abstractions to the problem domain and that correctness ultimately boils down to the expressibility of the language that allows it to create the correct abstractions. This interpretation might have to do with my having known many fans of Lisp (of which I'm one) and that people who love Lisp (like the author of the paper) are usually big expressibility proponents.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#302

Post by syngrog66 »

90%+ of its value is that its plain text. with just a few simple conventions for annoting

the individual also claimed (in so many words) that the trillion-dollar AI industry is "controlled" by Markdown. he has either a deeply wrong understanding of the technology, or a shameless ambition for making wild claims to boost traffic

strong writing skills. but weak on technology and nuance, or history of our field

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#303

Post by syngrog66 »

GuB-42 wrote: post #78
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…

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…

BINGO. a key point he either is ignorant about or strangely chooses to overlook

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#304

Post by dalemhurley »

dhosek wrote: post #267
duckmysick wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That made me think - are there any depictions of Markdown in movies and tv shows? I've seen a fair share of C, Java, HTML, and (in newer works) JavaScript and Python. And Perl in The Social Network. n.b.: the above quote is from The Matrix.

I think that was php in the social network.

If it is going to be accurate it is PHP.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#305

Post by leejoramo »

dchest wrote: post #139
ntnsndr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny that he didn't use the .md extension. Maybe because he started doing it before he expected his markup would merit its own filetype?

"Too late now, I suppose, but the only file extension I would endorse is “.markdown” [...] (I personally use “.text” for my own files, and have BBEdit set to use Markdown syntax coloring for that extension, which is why I never saw a need to endorse an official extension.)" https://daringfireball.net/linked/2014/01/08/markdown-extens...

Thanks for finding this post. I did a quick search for it and came up empty.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#306

Post by Linux-Fan »

thangalin wrote: post #277
tasuki wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is missing the #1 reason I like it though - it's fundamentally text. Sure, but that's table stakes. There are much better formats: AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, etc. Yet I also primarily use Markdown. I could use a format that's perhaps 20% better, and well-specified. But I'd have to use Markdown somewhere anyway. So I just stick with Markdown. It's good enough for me.

Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.

The original Markdown has fewer features than listed for the more advanced formats in the table. Hence if someone uses reStructuredText it is more precise than just saying “Markdown” because Markown could refer to anything from the original minimalist featureset to the vastly extended format supported by pandoc if given the appropriate CLI arguments.

Some text-based formats have more options for tables e.g. alignment of columns (it may help with numbers to right-align them) or multirow/multicolumn options. Some formats support definition lists (corresponds to in HTML) - a feature which I often find valuable but was not included in the original Markdown IIRC.

One advantage of using a text-based format is that it can be exported to either LaTeX or HTML and Markdown seems to prefer the HTML output by explicitly supporting inline HTML as an escape hatch for more complex constructs (e.g. tables with rowspan/colspan). In addition to often not being supported for a non-HTML export-type it also hurts the WYSIWYG experience when reading the file like plain text.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#307

Post by Linux-Fan »

trollbridge wrote: post #147
raincole wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fundamentally ok-ishly looking text. I think that is the biggest reason why Markdown doesn't support table. There are alternatives that do (e.g. wikitext) but they didn't get as popular as Markdown. Why? Perhaps it's because that tables will never really look fine in pure text no matter how clever your syntax is.

Provided you’ve got UTF-8 (or CP437/850/1521 etc) and fixed pitch, it’s easy to make tables.

I don't think that is sufficient for the general case because I would like to be able to use the markdown like _emphasis_ or [hyperlinks](https://www.example.com) even inside the table rows and this doesn't render properly when using fixed pitch “tables as source code blocks”

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#308

Post by ValentineC »

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…

> And after searching for a Mac one I finally bought Marked.

I like MacDown [1]. Someone recently forked it to MacDown 3000 [2].

[1] https://macdown.uranusjr.com

[2] https://macdown.app

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#309

Post by prmoustache »

xigoi wrote: post #192
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.)

The mistake people do is thinking markdown is something else than a text file formatting convention that is easily converted to other formats to make it prettier.

If what you want to do can't be done by a text file hosted on a gopher server, it just means markdown is not for your usecase.

Markdown is not meant to replace Latex or Microsoft Publisher.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#310

Post by huimang »

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?

With LSP and Marksman [0], those tables get formatted automatically on save for me.

https://github.com/artempyanykh/marksman

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