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Why are we still using Markdown?

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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#281

Post by Yokohiii »

fg137 wrote: post #277
Yokohiii wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried to create markdown like parser, I had to refer a lot to common marks. What I saw was madness. I never knew from casual use, that markdown is so complex. There is literally zero thought about parsing, it forces natural looking text into a format that can be structured into actual markup, but it has so many pitfalls and edge cases that it just feels wrong. Each time I've looked up another markdown pars…

> If you need an AST to parse something seemingly simple like markdown, then something went wrong. This may surprise you, but that is very common in programming languages.

Doesn't surprise me at all.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#282

Post by [deleted] »

kaycebasques wrote: post #249

> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output. This is my single biggest complaint about reStructuredText. You create headings by putting underlines and (optional!) overlines around the section heading text. But all of the following are valid title adornment characters: ! " # $ % & ' ( ) \* + , - . / : ; ? @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~ So in each doc you have to figure out the H1, H2, H3 formatting separately. E.g. in one doc it's: ==…

[deleted]

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#283

Post by roryokane »

karl42 wrote: post #198

https://djot.net/ seems to be very sane and still very similar to markdown. And after reading the CommonMark spec, I appreciate the saneness very much. CommonMark did a great job at describing all the rules and edge cases, but it clearly shows how messy markdown is. What do you all think of Djot?

I like most of Djot’s simplifications, but its requirement to write nested lists with blank lines between every change in indentation is a dealbreaker for me:

  - Djot requires
  
    - writing nested lists
  
      - with blank lines in between
  
    - successive list items at the same level
    - can skip the blank line
  
      - but not this list item
Yes, supporting indented list items without blank lines in between would make Djot’s parser more complicated. But I write nested lists all the time in my notes, and extra blank lines would distract from the content. For me, it’s not worth it to make my raw text ugly just to make the file easier to parse.

Djot could have avoided the blank line requirement by not trying to join hard-wrapped lines back into one paragraph / list item. That would work for me because I only soft wrap my text. Djot’s choice to support hard wrapping caused all of its users (including those who hard wrap) to have worse nested list syntax.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#285

Post by saltcured »

eviks wrote: post #243
duskdozer wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can still see the actual text that you're editing. And to reduce ambiguity. If you don't leave them, then you can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately after

> So you can still see the actual text that you're editing But you're not editing that text! You're editing some other text and see a bunch of asterisks all over the place. And this is especially bad in nested styles - try some colored bold word in a table cell - without hiding the markup you'll basically lose most of visibility into the text/table layout > to reduce ambiguity it does the opposite, you can't easily d…

Ha, I remember this religious debate all the way back in the days of text-mode word processing in the 80s on CP/M and PC. I was indoctrinated in the WordStar camp where style controls were visible in the editor between actual text characters, so you could move the cursor between them and easily decide to insert text inside or outside the styled region. This will forever seem a more coherent editing UI to me.

This might be why I also liked LaTeX. The markup itself is semantic and meant to help me understand what I am editing. It isn't just some keyboard-shortcut to inject a styling command. It is part of the document structure.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#286

Post by AlienRobot »

Tadpole9181 wrote: post #143
krapp wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You must be kidding. If you can read BBCode you can read HTML.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#289

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

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.

I have historically used asterisks for emphasis and slashes for the use/mention distinction.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#290

Post by ForSpareParts »

As somebody who is currently trying to use structured markdown in obsidian for knowledge management and finding it a bit challenging, I agree with the author that markdown is not the ideal language for what he and I are trying to do with it, and that we'd probably be better served by something else. But I'm not necessarily convinced such a language would find a lot of adoption, because I suspect that most people using markdown aren't doing what we're doing, and are quite well served by what's there. Actually, I'm one of those people about 90% of the time -- I have never thought about any of this stuff while writing a readme or a forum post, and that's what MD is actually for. How many users are out there clamoring for a completely unambiguous markup language optimized for parsing and extensibility?
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