161–170 of 328 posts
> It has so many poor decisions baked in that if you try to use it it will actively fight against you the moment you think you know what you’re doing.
That misses the point. The point of Markdown is simplicity, not perfection. And that is also the reason why Markdown will prevail.
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I don’t like WYSIWYG editing, as it makes the formatting invisible.
Then you might like Obsidian. When the cursor is in some bit of formatted text, it displays all of the characters. When the cursor is elsewhere, it just shows the formatted text. In the worst case, the barrier to entry and exit are pretty low.
First you can switch from WYSIWYG to text editor instantly.
Then you have an outline where you can manipulate your “markdown blocks” [i.e title and its content] by drag n drop. Or extract a “markdown block” as a new note, and leave a reference where it originally was extracted from.
And then [the killing feature], it displays the content of a link, web link or internal link, as a [kind of] iframe, if you prepend a ! to the link.
# Hi
I am a simple _programmer_ doing
elegant programming.
And here is my portfolio
I am a super *grinch* yall
I am a super grinch yall
Similarly, the div in the first example produces div, p, close-p, close-div, because the rule isn't "find he closing tag". The rule is something like "if the line starts with html then stop parsing and just copy until the next blank line.
All that said, I know the rules and generally know how to follow them. Of course I still run into the issue that even though there's commonmark, every site and tool is running their own variation which are incompatible.
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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.
The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.
It is because the primary target for markdown is what would in any other formatting language be the source. Markdown has no source. It is guidelines for good looking plain text layout that when followed can be used to make a typeset document. Everybody sort of knows it sucks as a formatting language. But we love it anyway. The benefit of being able to get a typeset document from a nice looking plaintext document is j…
Personally, I always default to the simplest of tools. That's why I truly believe that anything meant for actual human use needs to have reasonable defaults. No "look at all the configs you can have", but a "let's get you what you need".
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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.
Oh, please . Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that. What a rediculous thing to even say.
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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.
troff was originally used to format printed output, where hyperlinks would not make any sense.
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…
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Oh, please . Don't insult everyone here by pretending you actually believe HTML is a human readable format like markdown. It was never designed for that and has never claimed that. What a rediculous thing to even say.
It is. Humans do read it, and have read it. Like any language it's just a matter of familiarity. HTML was designed for humans to read and write long before Claude or compiling everything from typescript or whatever, when websites were all written by hand. In text editors. Even if you were using PHP and templates or CGI you wrote that shit by hand, which meant you had to be able to read it and understand it. Even if y…