Easy and "good enough" very often trumps complex and comprehensive. Markdown is great precisely because it can't do a lot of things.
Why are we still using Markdown?
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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#32Markdown is widely used but I agree that it's a mess, there are so many dialects..
A similar but better markup is ASCIIDOC; it's formally defined and comes with a Technology Compatiblity Kit (TCK) that can be used to certify the compliance of an implementation with the spec.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#33Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough." We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough! Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the…
For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists. • I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
I suggest trying Obsidian for WYSIWYG markdown editing. It beats heck out of typing it raw and eliminates that cognitive load.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#34Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough." We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough! Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the…
It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code.
It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#35Markdown is essentially plain text with a couple extra features. I think Markdown’s basic appeal is that it’s plain text.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#36The article correctly identifies the upsides of Markdown, then identifies a bunch of issues that I, as a casual user of it, don't care about.
Then, in the solution section, doesn't identify a solution.
No thank you, I'll stick with Markdown.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#37I don't read HTML all the time, and I don't expect it to be easy to read when outside of a browser.
Markdown though, that's my slightly fancy readme. It has just enough structure that I can easily read and understand it on the command line.
I can easily grep it without need for an advanced parsing engine.
If you need something with font and style weight then go for HTML.
But if I see README.html with a project, it's going to put me off wanting to contribute. I do not want to learn that project's style guide for how to add some new parameters to a table or remember that they want to specify italics in one of a dozen different ways.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#38That is a lot of complaining for having no suggested better alternative.
And there is your answer to the clickbait title -- we're still using markdown because there's no alternative that is so much better that it is going to dethrone the one that has all the momentum from being the first good-enough take on this that got any traction.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#39Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines. Almost everyone who complains has some parser or rendering related agenda. No one cares if you can't nest asterisks inside underscores. Most of these edge cases don't read well as Markdown, which defeats the purpose.
>Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines.
We already had plain text for that. Markdown was invented to be converted to HTML. It has no utility over plain text otherwise. The link and image syntax is doing what HTML tags do, but are less readable for people than just pasting the URL. The relationship to the machine isn't incidental, it's intrinsic.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#40Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough." We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough! Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the…
For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic. • I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists. • I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.
1&2 just pick one, it doesn’t matter. 3 mostly you’re the parser… if you’re after accuracy there are better versions, but it sure is simple to read and write