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Why are we still using Markdown?

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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#151

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

nostrademons wrote: post #75
reaperducer wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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* _underline_ ~strikethrough~ /italics/ > Quotation - list - list - list I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.

Your quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.) Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.

What ambiguities are there with bold?

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#152

Post by beautron »

reaperducer wrote: post #52
nostrademons wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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* _underline_ ~strikethrough~ /italics/ > Quotation - list - list - list I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.

One problem with the /italics/ form is that it's not convenient when writing about filesystem paths (though I do like its visual indication of slanting).

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#155

Post by Diti »

asdfman123 wrote: post #36

The 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.

The solution is to use any other better-defined languages with a cheat sheet like [1].

If you’re used to CommonMark features, this is all you need.

[1]: https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#156

Post by nickloewen »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #151
nostrademons wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.) Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.

What ambiguities are there with bold ?

Suppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold.

* I had to escape all of these asterisks.

** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#157

Post by kang »

"No, I was and remain against establishing extensions. Markdown has thrived because it’s a small idea, not a spec, and thus embraces many variants to suit particularly needs and contexts." https://x.com/gruber/status/1495119598148009991

A thread on markdown creator's stance https://x.com/nalband/status/1625541479295860752

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#158

Post by nickloewen »

mh- wrote: post #50
xigoi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails.

In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."

Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#159

Post by MrVandemar »

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.

That is an unjustified over-generalisation.

HTML markup is pretty readable (except when it becomes soup) and I read and write raw HTML documents all the time. I like it better than markdown.

It's even more readable in a code editor that distiguishes tags from content.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#160

Post by mschnell »

nickloewen wrote: post #158
mh- wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails. In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..." Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."

I remember it like this: If you squint the brackets around the link text make a rectangle and look almost like a button you can press. [Press here](to.go.there)
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