I just can't find myself summoning the energy to be mad about markdown. It's good enough for like 99% of the things I use it for. Sometimes I get annoyed at specific extension support or whatever when I realize I shouldn't be using markdown for that task.
Why are we still using Markdown?
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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#42Hard, hard no on this.
Why are we using Markdown? Why do I use it every day?
It's easy to write. It's easy to read. Despite the OP's complaints, quality parsers exist.
pandoc can turn it into almost any format. We will still be writing markdown in 50 years, because the design bridges a bunch of compromises very nicely.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#43Ambiguous means unclear meaning, not that there is more than one way to achieve the same thing. Html has that same problem. Think , , , etc. That’s life. Get used to it.
is now hilariously called the " b ring attention to" element. I shit you not.
That's the sort of "we started at the acronym and worked backwards" approach the Pentagon loves to do.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#44The "right element for the right meaning" crowd is always going to fall when they charge against the sheer walls of "but I like using Caution for my bulleted list" crowd. Or the "of course we put tire patches in the wiring element, it's when we use the tire patches".
Or a million other examples I've wrassled with over the literal decades.
Whatever sophisticated semantic scheme you move into the markup layer, is gonna get messed up. And then your fancy schema is just noise, very expensive noise. Markup layer needs to glue as closely to natural language constructs as possible, and then glue a little more closely than that, and let the bulk of the information derived come from natlang. It's boring, but it works, and it's easier than ever to get quantitative information out of natlang.
Keep the domain stuff out of the markup layer.
All that said, Asciidoc forever baby. Write actual books in it. Not really more complex than Markdown[1]. Beats up DITA, takes its lunch money. Win win win.
[1] Unless you go legit insane with `include` and `ifdef/ifndef/ifeval`
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#45Funniest part of this article is claiming * will produce a b tag then demonstrating it will usually produce a strong tag and not even noticing this.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#46All problems are solved once you embrace org-mode. All you need is Emacs! Nothing more!
Objectively false. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#47Because there's only one reasonable implementation of AsciiDoc
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#48Markdown lacks JavaScript and can be considered mostly harmless.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#49You can say hell on your own blog.
Interestingly, you can also choose not to say it on your own blog.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#50Because, 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.
> compared to other markup languages
I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days.
What are you contrasting to?
As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.