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Why are we still using Markdown?

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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#131

Post by Ferret7446 »

pclowes wrote: post #123

We use markdown because LLMs are great at it. Markdown in the same directory as the code it documents is very readable by humans and LLMs. Given LLMs proficiency in markdown and that reading it in view and edit mode is comparable I bet many engineering teams ditch confluence/Google docs for documentation in favor of just markdown plaintext docs adjacent to code (my team has moved design/RFCs to this as well, get feed…

LLMs are great at it because it was already a widely adopted standard and fed to LLMs in training sets

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#132

Post by Tadpole9181 »

zimpenfish wrote: post #54
quelsolaar wrote: post #18

Mark 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.

No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices.

And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#133

Post by nine_k »

neonstatic wrote: post #119

This may be the first time my reaction to an objectively terrible programming language is a shrug and a "whatever". I like using markdown. I use it for journaling in Obsidian. It does everything I want it to. I like that it's just flat files. I don't want my journaling to be stuck in some online database. Yet, I am the same person who refuses to code in anything but Rust due to how not-awful it feels to me. Strange h…

> Markdown in an of itself isn’t powerful enough to satisfy the simple monkey brained developer like me who is only satisfied when the site looks good enough™.

Well, indeed, Markdown is an inadequate tool for that. Let the author use more powerful tools, be it HTML, LaTeX, SVG, etc.

Markdown is fine for its intended purpose: very light formatting, very simple header structure. If I were not that lazy, i would come up with something opposite to CommonMark, some MarkDownDown, that does away with alternative ways to format things, most escaping, and most advanced syntax. The goal would be to have an easy-to-implement, unambiguous, safe and simple subset good for use anywhere. Intentionally limited.

(For daily use I prefer Org Mode, due to its vastly superior support in my preferred editor.)

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#134

Post by fanf2 »

Joker_vD wrote: post #102
AlotOfReading wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is pretty far from the worst. It's decent and unobtrusive. Worst would be something like Troff or jira formatting. Midtier would be RST.

Ugh, troff. It's mind-boggling that the closest way to have an actual (hyper)link in a manpage is to use your pager's "search for text" function. No, "JuSt usE gNu iNfO it'S beTtER" is not an answer either.

If the manpage is written with the 4.4BSD -mdoc semantic markup macros then it can contain hyperlinks like

  .Lk https://dotat.at/ "Tony Finch’s web site"
And the mandoc tools will include them in their really nice HTML output. It will also hyperlink .Xr cross-references to other man pages.

https://mandoc.bsd.lv/

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#135

Post by gloryjulio »

neonstatic wrote: post #119

This may be the first time my reaction to an objectively terrible programming language is a shrug and a "whatever". I like using markdown. I use it for journaling in Obsidian. It does everything I want it to. I like that it's just flat files. I don't want my journaling to be stuck in some online database. Yet, I am the same person who refuses to code in anything but Rust due to how not-awful it feels to me. Strange h…

Exactly. I write my own notes in markdown, it works with or without a viewer app. I am not even sure if there is a better alternative. This format is good enough for most of the casual and semi serious use cases

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#136

Post by brookst »

0xffff2 wrote: post #129

This is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it. Also, as I use it,…

Exactly this. At this point I read markdown as if it were rendered, with the exception of tables which are a mess visually in plain text.

But everything else, headings and bold and italics and lists, I’m honestly not sure I can tell the difference. It’s like watching movies with subtitles when you’re sufficiently experienced: your brain just fills in the gaps and you don’t even notice

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#137

Post by Yokohiii »

0xffff2 wrote: post #129

This is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it. Also, as I use it,…

I don't know YAML well enough, I never liked it. But if you want to write an halfway common marks compliant parser, then markdown is just nuts. It is just way too complicated for the simplicity it conveys. Look at lists, they can be freely nested, and contain all(?) other block elements. That is extreme overkill. If you need that much flexibility, then any wannabe "simple" markup is just the wrong choice.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#138

Post by MaulingMonkey »

neonstatic wrote: post #119

This may be the first time my reaction to an objectively terrible programming language is a shrug and a "whatever". I like using markdown. I use it for journaling in Obsidian. It does everything I want it to. I like that it's just flat files. I don't want my journaling to be stuck in some online database. Yet, I am the same person who refuses to code in anything but Rust due to how not-awful it feels to me. Strange h…

I use a horrific mix of:

• Markdown (most of my notes these days, supplanting my previous use of plaintext.)

• Single-file HTML (when my use case for fancy documents exceeds markdown's limits. While you can embed HTML into markdown, renderers vary in what they allow or sanitize, and vary in how you can (ab)use style tags. I've even taken to looking up CSS rules for printed documents, since my intended target is often pdfs or actual print at that point. Occasionally, JavaScript!)

• Google docs (Android phone nonsense!)

I'd mutter something about "using the right tool for the right job", but that's probably giving myself too much credit.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#139

Post by krapp »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #132
zimpenfish wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices. And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.

On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#140

Post by sooc »

Markdown is _fine_? I certainly have my own issues with it; most of which can be mitigated by adhering to a style guide (e.g. only use one syntax for and as well as and headers). I'm not sure why we need both asterisks and underscores to represent the __same semantics__ – to me this feels wasteful of precious ASCII. Perhaps it was to allow the writer to express their preference while providing a shared and consistent meaning (same with the other duplicate forms). In that sense it seems to have done an excellent okay job at affirming common ground. I'm not sure. From what I can tell, the original author has been reluctant to do the work here and has left this for others (i.e. CommonMark).

I do love writing in Markdown, but my reasons are adjacent in some ways. It's a flat file, the syntax is easy to on-board new users with, adoption is widespread, and the HTML escape hatch is available. I only adhere to the syntax because I can usually expect a parser to exist for whatever environment I'm in.

I don't think this is the best we can do (or have done). I find myself conflicted about where to go next. Gemtext is nice! Except, what I often want is more expressiveness and consistency. This will probably be, for me, a spec that can still be run through a "reasonable" Markdown parser. When the output breaks, it still comes out as readable plain text (albeit with some weird ASCII scattered through my prose).

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