Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
wilfred.me.uk
Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
1–10 of 99 posts
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#2Newer markdown stuff here: http://commonmark.org/
Gruber did not want them to use the word markdown so they changed to commonmark. And they are trying to standardize with a spec. I would also consider it along with your other alternatives.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#3Part of the problem is that people don't really grok the point of Markdown. There's a reason it doesn't support tables, or a syntax for making the kind of language used in a code snippet. The point of Markdown is to mimic the conventions of ASCII-text email, both to make writing it as natural as possible, and to make Markdown pleasant to read in both ASCII and HTML.
If you want something more featureful than Markdown, the problem isn't Markdown; it's that you're using the wrong tool for the job.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#4Markdown. Is. Not. A. Language.
Markdown was never intended to have any particular standardized syntax -- it was simply a script that took a common syntax used for a long time when formatting plain text and convert it to formatted HTML. The attempts to standardize it are misguided, as there is absolutely no need for that -- there are numerous existing standards for precisely that, starting with ReST which follows a pretty similar syntax (in fact, any attempt to standardize Markdown will end up with something very similar, as it has to solve all the same issues).
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#5I've been using Textile for ages, and it's much better than Markdown for just about anything _except_ footnotes (in MultiMarkdown) and pieces with multiple references to the same URL.
In particular, Textile has great table syntax, which I use extensively in pages like http://the.taoofmac.com/space/infoviz (markup at http://the.taoofmac.com/media/infoviz/index.txt). But over the years I became so used to Markdown (largely thanks to the profusion of editor support it spawned) that I mostly gave in.
Still, Creole might be a good addition to my next CMS/Wiki: http://github.com/rcarmo/sushy (already supports Textile, Markdown and ReST).
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#6Part of the problem is that people don't really grok the point of Markdown. There's a reason it doesn't support tables, or a syntax for making the kind of language used in a code snippet. The point of Markdown is to mimic the conventions of ASCII-text email, both to make writing it as natural as possible, and to make Markdown pleasant to read in both ASCII and HTML. If you want something more featureful than Markdown…
org-mode in emacs supports tables, and it's ASCII-based.
Here's an example, displayed exactly how you would see it marked up in org-mode syntax in emacs:
|-----+-------|
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| 00 | foo |
| 01 | bar |
|-----+-------|
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#7Part of the problem is that people don't really grok the point of Markdown. There's a reason it doesn't support tables, or a syntax for making the kind of language used in a code snippet. The point of Markdown is to mimic the conventions of ASCII-text email, both to make writing it as natural as possible, and to make Markdown pleasant to read in both ASCII and HTML. If you want something more featureful than Markdown…
>There's a reason it doesn't support tables
I don't see how the inclusion of tables violates the ascii-like readability of markdown. Github has implemented a table syntax that is natural to read/write and makes it easy to include tables in your document. Example: https://github.com/Defconbots/2015_target/blob/master/hw/boa...
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#8I don't like any of them. Markdown, ReST, various wiki/forum dialects of "simplified" text formatting. They are all as complicated if not more complicated than just writing HTML. They all have a bunch of rules and special cases. I'd rather just write in HTML which I already know.
I don't understand the motivation for any of these "alternative" markup formats. Normal non-technical people want Word (or at least, some kind of WYSIWYG text entry). I've been on projects where they tried to get non-developers to use ReST and it was an abject disaster. The tech writers revolted and refused to use it. So then a developer had to be sidelined to convert their Word documents to ReST so that we could produce HTML.
Yeah HTML is not perfect, but neither is any of these other markup languages. If you like one, fine, but don't wonder why none of them has really caught on outside of small niches of highly technical people.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#9Part of the problem is that people don't really grok the point of Markdown. There's a reason it doesn't support tables, or a syntax for making the kind of language used in a code snippet. The point of Markdown is to mimic the conventions of ASCII-text email, both to make writing it as natural as possible, and to make Markdown pleasant to read in both ASCII and HTML. If you want something more featureful than Markdown…
org-mode in emacs supports tables, and it's ASCII-based. Here's an example, displayed exactly how you would see it marked up in org-mode syntax in emacs: |-----+-------| | Key | Value | |-----+-------| | 00 | foo | | 01 | bar | |-----+-------| org-mode can export to HTML, and many other formats.
Org-mode is a beast. A fantastic beast, much like Emacs itself. You dive in, but there's always more to learn. Some things may be for you and some things don't. Everyone should give it a try.
A little known fact, even among most org-users: Github can render org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo, thus you can write your README files as org-files.
Shameless example: https://github.com/josteink/csharp-mode/blob/master/README.o...
This alone was enough to make me drop Markdown as my go-to format for semi-formatted text-files.
A subtle killer feature here is org-babel. You can embed proper code in your text-files and have your editor (at least Emacs) understand them as such. Which makes it excellent for writing technical documentation for projects where code is involved.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#10Markdown. Is. Not. A. Language. Markdown was never intended to have any particular standardized syntax -- it was simply a script that took a common syntax used for a long time when formatting plain text and convert it to formatted HTML. The attempts to standardize it are misguided, as there is absolutely no need for that -- there are numerous existing standards for precisely that, starting with ReST which follows a p…
>Markdown was never intended to have any particular standardized syntax
At some point it was intended to be standardized or else we wouldn't have a standardized version of markdown syntax.