Can we get a (2012)?
Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
11–20 of 99 posts
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#12Part 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 tables are great, but they're only easy to type because org-mode does the dynamic resizing and border drawing for you. Markdown is supposed to be simple to type in any plain text editor.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#13I 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 k…
> 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 find that Markdown is significantly easier/faster to write than HTML and, more importantly, easier to read in its un-rendered form. To me (and presumably lots of other people, given Markdown's ubiquity) it's well worth learning the relatively small syntax.
Edit: Here's a quick comparison with a README.md from one of my projects:
Rendered: https://github.com/cespare/reflex/blob/master/README.md
Markdown: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cespare/reflex/master/READ...
HTML: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cespare/ad6c41aa28583cac8...
Three things I notice from this example:
- The verbosity of an XML syntax with HTML is annoying, particularly the need for closing tags. - Automatic linkification prevents stuttering: http://example.com" rel="nofollow">http://example.com">http://example.comxyz- Having to escape certain characters like & makes this HTML sample harder to read (this is more of a problem with technical/code documents).
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#14Newer 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.
CommonMark doesn't really fix much given it's not so much a proper spec as a set of tests, and most big users (who wrote the spec!) aren't actually using CommonMark anyway.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#15Markdown. 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.
But there isn't a standardised version of Markdown. There's John Gruber's original syntax, and there are dozens if not hundreds of variants.
When some enterprising people declared they had created "Standard Markdown" the original author got very upset: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common...
Markdown does not have standards, it's just a collection of base formatting conventions a lot of people like.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#16Part 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…
To add to that, Markdown was created to scratch one person's itch with no real desire to support a wider community. It was put online and other people liked it and modified it, but the original site doesn't have any of this.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#17Part 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...
I built a tool to convert your CSV tables to Markdown table format: https://github.com/mplewis/csvtomd
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-m…
> 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.
I recently stumbled across the tidbit. The Ruby library Github uses to generate it though isn't 100% though. If you want to use org-mode properties for style customization of html output your SOL.
Original project:
https://github.com/bdewey/org-ruby
Currently, you cannot do much to customize the conversion. The
supplied textile conversion is optimized for extracting “content”
from the orgfile as opposed to “metadata.”
https://github.com/wallyqs/org-ruby
Which has no such note, but doesn't say anything about supporting it.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
But there isn't a standardised version of Markdown. There's John Gruber's original syntax, and there are dozens if not hundreds of variants. When some enterprising people declared they had created "Standard Markdown" the original author got very upset: http://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common... Markdown does not have standards, it's just a collection of base formatting conventions a lot of people…
> There's John Gruber's original syntax, and there are dozens if not hundreds of variants.
All of the variants exist due to the many undefined edge cases in the original syntax, and not further development by Gruber to 'officially' resolve ambiguities. Some of them became their own standards (e.g. MultiMarkdown) others just became undocumented behaviours of certain Markdown parsers and/or generators when handling edge-cases with no defined 'official' way to handle them.
> When some enterprising people declared they had created "Standard Markdown" the original author got very upset:
This seems to have more to do with the name being 'Standard Markdown' and seeing it as an attempt to usurp 'ownership' of the 'Markdown' name. Said author didn't flip out over variants like MultiMarkdown.
> Markdown does not have standards, it's just a collection of base formatting conventions a lot of people like.
The efforts of people to standardize it are efforts to resolve this idea, and make Markdown more formal.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#20Newer 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.
CommonMark doesn't really fix much given it's not so much a proper spec as a set of tests, and most big users (who wrote the spec!) aren't actually using CommonMark anyway.
> most big users (who wrote the spec!) aren't actually using CommonMark anyway.
I'd say this is partially due to inertial. Reddit and StackExchange for example, have communities that have been writing in their variants of Markdown for years at this point.