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Why are we still using Markdown?

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Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#301

Post by oftenwrong »

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 long used underscores for _emphasis_, but I never made the connection that it was meant to resemble an underline until now.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#302

Post by eszed »

saltcured wrote: post #285
eviks wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 mig…

Same, same.

And... I preferred WordPerfect's separate "reveal codes" pane, which reduced the opportunity for ambiguity. WP 5.1 has never been equalled as a general-purpose word processor.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#303

Post by saltcured »

eviks wrote: post #293
saltcured wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

> easily decide to insert text inside or outside the styled region. Only for the 3 primitive styles that were supported? 3 table cells of RedBold GreenLowerCaps BlueUnderlineItalic isn't easy anymore But also - there wasn't a single app in the 80s with a different easy approach, right? So removing noise had a downside. > styling command. It is part of the document structure. Not for the most used markdown markers, wh…

Heh, I'm not even sure WordStart other styles at that level. Changing the color back then would mean having the print job pause and the screen prompt you to change ink ribbon and press a key to continue. I can't remember if it could also prompt to change the daisy wheel, or whether font was a global property of the document. The daisy wheels did have a slant/italic set, so it could select those alternate glyphs on the fly from the same wheel. Bold and underline were done by composition, using overstrike, rather than separate glyphs.

But yeah, this tension you are describing is also where other concepts like "paragraph styles" bothered me in later editors. I think I want/expect "span styles" so it is always a container of characters with a semantic label, which I could then adjust later in the definitions.

Decades later, it still repulses me how the paragraph styles devolve into a bunch of undisciplined characters with custom styling when I have to work on shared documents. At some point, the only sane recourse is to strip all custom styling and then go back and selectively apply things like emphasis again, hoping you didn't miss any.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#304

Post by NetMageSCW »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #223
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…

Saying, that it is the best compromise we know of is going a little far, I think. There are more readable intuitive formats, but they simply don't have the spread, that markdown formats have.

Why do you think that is?

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#305

Post by NetMageSCW »

hulitu wrote: post #299
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…

> We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. What's wrong with .txt ?

We also want standard structure so the more than the content is understood.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#306

Post by NetMageSCW »

nine_k wrote: post #268
xigoi wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a strict subset of Markdown would make it itpossible to achieve simplicity. From the rationale: > Rules for emphasis should be simpler. The fact that doubled characters are used for strong emphasis in commonmark leads to many potential ambiguities, which are resolved by a daunting list of 17 rules. It is hard to form a good mental model of these rules. Most of the time they interpret things the way a human woul…

Indeed. I'd go with dead simple rules. The below assumes whitespace or punctuation on either side: *bold* _italic_ *_bold italic_* _*also bold italic*_ Any other combination does not parse as formatting, and is considered literal text. Yes, this prevents marginally useful cases like putting an it al ic fragment in the middle of the word. I'd be fine with that.

So y = x * 7 + b * c will be bolded in the middle?

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#307

Post by NetMageSCW »

alpaca128 wrote: post #109
Arainach wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Wrong" does not necessarily mean "against the standard". It means "against common usage and good team practice" in this context. It's "allowed" to use raw pointers, malloc, and any number of things in C++ code. In general, if you do any of them in a modern codebase you're doing it wrong.

Yes, it's obviously "against common usage" given HTML support exists specifically for less common features that Markdown does not support. Like tables, which are supported by some implementations but not all, and iirc not even all Markdown variants that support tables use the same syntax for them. The only way to be 100% sure is to use HTML. Of course you wouldn't do that if you just have the file on Github, but in g…

But it is a bad reason that goes against the reasons for the creation of Markdown.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#308

Post by NetMageSCW »

MereInterest wrote: post #221
danhau wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 Not too long ago, I used to think that Markdown was the Bee‘s knees. But having been forced to write some documentation in plaintext, I learned that plaintext is significantly more readable than raw markdown. I think one of Markdown‘s biggest sins is how it handles line breaks. Single line breaks being discarded in the output guarantees that your nicely formatted text will look worse when rendered. I understand th…

> I think one of Markdown‘s biggest sins is how it handles line breaks. Single line breaks being discarded in the output guarantees that your nicely formatted text will look worse when rendered. My experience has been the complete opposite. Markdown parsers that don’t discard single linebreaks (e.g. GitHub-flavored markdown) turn my nicely formatted text into a ragged mess of partially-filled lines. Or for narrow dis…

Your text isn’t nicely formatted, which is the point. Discarding line breaks is a terrible idea inherited in general.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#309

Post by NetMageSCW »

MrVandemar wrote: post #159
Tadpole9181 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ask your grandmother to do the same.

Re: Why are we still using Markdown?

#310

Post by NetMageSCW »

Yokohiii wrote: post #141
jdefr89 wrote: post #115

A few things here. 1. Use a proper Markdown parser. The grammar is easy to define EBNF style most implementations I see now days use some recursive descent parser, etc… Regex implementation was used in original authors parser when it became popular. 2. You can resolve ambiguities and define more consistent symbols that make sense. Most markdown implementations are decent and follow common sense best practice syntax.…

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…

Because the size of the optional parser for Markdown is irrelevant to the purpose of Markdown.
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