Why would anyone dislike markdown when it is so simple to use? My only gripe with markdown is that sometimes i forget how to include links.
Why are we still using Markdown?
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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#52Because, 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 comm…
markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media
For those of you who weren't there:
*bold*
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> Quotation
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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#53On one hand, yes, all true, it’s definitely a bit of a mess. On the other hand, what’s the alternative and don’t all languages with limitations ultimately get extended by various parties in non-compliant ways? Can anyone point to any alternative that has done it all correctly? Show me one language where someone says “This is all good and correct” and I’ll show you a language with 100 feature requests to extend it way further than its original authors intended and would create a similar mess if acted on. This is all to say, I’m going to coin Roberts’ Rule which says “All markup languages eventually end up as piles of poo with half a Turing-complete language bolted onto the side. Resistance is futile.”
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#54Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poo…
> Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good.
God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web?
What a beautiful couple of years that was.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#55Because, 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 comm…
Stepped right on the rake though because it uses sigils which were common, but requires they be used in uncommon ways (by doubling etc) which it why most chat UIs don't actually use markdown
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#56I'm not using Markdown; I'm using plain text, along with a handful of well-understood formatting conventions which go back decades. "Markdown" is just a prettier means of displaying such text.
HTML is not a markup language anymore; it has become a lunatic application platform, and the last thing I want when trying to read some text is the intrusion of some lunatic's application.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#57I think the author is missing the point. Markdown is easy for humans to read, write, and modify. Yes, parsers can be complicated. Few people need to write parsers, so that's ok, if unfortunate for those parser authors. Orders of magnitude more people need to read, write, and modify the documents themselves, and the fact that it's easy to do so is a huge strength.
HTML is terrible when you consider these properties. It's not easy to read, and is annoying to write and modify. Ditto for any other XML-based markup language, or even something like RST. LaTeX is right out.
Ultimately the author seems to suggest plain text should be what people use? That misses the point. Plain text is great for a lot of things, but if you're going to generate HTML (or something else) from it, you need something that at least has some structure. Markdown hits a nice sweet spot where it has enough structure such that you can reasonably generate rich-text document formats from it, but not so much that non-technical users can't work their heads around the format.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#58The answer to the question in the headline:
- It's pretty easy for humans to read & write
- It's very easy for AI to read & write
- It's quite token-efficient relative to its expressiveness
- It can be used in many different contexts, so it's actually surprisingly good for interchange.
There are many formats that are better-suited for a given purpose, but Markdown remains a very attractive compromise for many applications.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#59What was the Bjarne Stroustrup quote about two types of languages again? I certainly have gotten more mileage out of Markdown at this point in my long career as a programmer and web developer than I have out of hand-written HTML, XML, or other markup languages. The latter are good for automation and unambiguous representation needed for system building, but for the type of informal writing that is my bread and butter outside of coding, Markdown kills, and Obsidian is the killer app.
Re: Why are we still using Markdown?
#60All problems are solved once you embrace org-mode. All you need is Emacs! Nothing more!
Objectively false. Please stop spreading misinformation.
I can think of a lot of potentially false things in the statement. The biggest falsehood likely is the perception that one needs Emacs. :-)