Why are we still using Markdown? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#171

Post by xigoi » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:56 AM UTC

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…

> 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.

You know, like when you write in HTML or \section{} in LaTeX?

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#172

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:57 AM UTC

ang_cire wrote: post #167

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm confused. Are you saying you cannot read an HTML file?

[deleted]

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#173

Post by edanm » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 6:57 AM UTC

neonstatic wrote: post #120

otterley wrote: post #3

Because, 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…

> worse is better It's a very old idea In the paper, Copernicus postulated the principle that "bad money drives out good", which later came to be referred to as Gresham's law after a later describer, Sir Thomas Gresham. This phenomenon had been noted earlier by Nicole Oresme, but Copernicus rediscovered it independently. Gresham's law is still known in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe as the Copernicus-Gresham L…

I'm not quite sure I understand the connection.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#174

Post by noisem4ker » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

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.

I don't think they were appreciating that HTML could be read unrendered. I think they meant that it was up to the browser to render HTML with sensible but unspecified or otherwise user-specified styling (the browser is supposed to be a "user agent", remember?) before web designers started aiming for pixel-perfect control through CSS.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#175

Post by ifh-hn » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:09 AM UTC

I'm in no way saying that markdown is perfect but it is much better than anything else I've used. It's got me through both a bachelors and masters.

The author of this article appears to be unaware of pandoc, and even better quarto. I started with pandoc and various plugins and my own scripts but moved to quarto, it is excellent.

https://quarto.org/

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#176

Post by oliwarner » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:30 AM UTC

Because it's Good Enough™ in many use-cases.

A critique of MD carries no wind in my sails when it can't even appreciate why marrying multiple contemporary chat-grade formats into a document format might be a helpful thing.

Of course there are problems as you veer away from chat-like messaging, but it does a lot, and allows HTML when it can't go any further.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#177

Post by atoav » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:31 AM UTC

I wrote my MA thesis in Markdown. The good thing about Markdown is that it forced you to just write and it had enough markup to be useful, but not so much thst you depend time procrastinating getting the output perfect (like LaTeX).

Pandoc can convert Markdown to .icml this is an Adobe InDesign format which allows you to go from markdown to a professional typesetting solution including figures, footnotes etc.

Of course if you write a physics or math paper there are better solutions, but for the majority of things you could write markdown is good enough and that is the reason so much of the content you encounter is in markdown.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#178

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

I always advocate for XML. While Markdown is like "a car in any color as long as it's black", XML is a) exactly what you need and b) as precise as you need it, and also c) not more precise than necessary.

We all need headers and paragraphs, right. But I might want file listings. Or command-line snippets with my own color coding and marks. Or C declarations and precise references to them in text. Or todos. Or bibliographic information. Or I want to express the difference between emphasis and italics. Or I don't. And so on. With XML I grow my own notation that fits like a glove. There's no boilerplate, everything is there for a purpose.

Besides, it is not that incompatible with plain text. Here's plain text:

    abc def ghi

Here's well-formed XML:

    
    abc def ghi

That's all, save for two extra newlines. Plain text is the best thing when you write to think. But once you're done with thinking you might want to add a date mark, a tag, or another more structured content. With XML you can have both.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#179

Post by cush » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:35 AM UTC

Just write in whatever language makes you happy. Nobody is forcing you to use markdown

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#180

Post by je42 » Sat, Apr 04, 2026, 7:43 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #34

otterley wrote: post #3

Because, 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…

Writing mark down linter, i am i nterested in - if you think that you requirements for markdown formatting could be encoded in (relatively) simple rules?