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Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

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Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#21

Post by tedunangst »

pmoriarty wrote: post #6
tptacek wrote: post #3

Part 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.

What happens when I add a new value that's "much longer"?

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#23

Post by stormbrew »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #4

Markdown. 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…

Since when does something have to have a standard syntax to be a language? I mean, if you said "it's not a programming language" because it's not really executable in even a limited sense, I'd get that, but to say it's not a language -- a means of communicating information -- is just absurd. There's no standard BASIC, and there are almost certainly hundreds if not thousands of variants of it, but no one would say it's not a language because of that.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

cespare wrote: post #13
ams6110 wrote: post #8

I 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 relati…

[deleted]

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#25

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

ams6110 wrote: post #8

I 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…

So much this.

Normal non-technical people understand that you click a bold 'B' and you get bold text, you click an italic 'I' and you get italic text, you click a little list icon and you get a list, and so on.

contenteditable has its quirks, sure, but modern browsers mean it's no longer the brainmelt it once was. Real WYSIWYG entry is achievable and almost easy. Markdown has one great usecase (producing documents that are viewable both as plain ASCII and as 'compiled' rich text), but it's not a tool for Joe Normal.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#26

Post by rtpg »

tptacek wrote: post #3

Part 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…

This feels like a post-facto explanation that gives way too much credit to Gruber as a language designer.

I find it hard to assume that Markdown is extremely well thought-through considering the fact that we didn't even get a grammar for the language, just an implementation that would be considered super broken in any other language.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#27

Post by pmoriarty »

tedunangst wrote: post #21
pmoriarty wrote: post #6

Earlier 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.

What happens when I add a new value that's "much longer"?

At first,

  |-----+-------|
  | Key | Value |
  |-----+-------|
  |  00 | foo   |
  |  01 | bar   |
  |-----+-------|
becomes

  |-----+-------|
  | Key | Value |
  |-----+-------|
  |  00 | foo   |
  |  01 | bar   |
  |  02 | much longer |
  |-----+-------|
but as soon as I hit TAB, it turns in to:

  |-----+-------------|
  | Key | Value       |
  |-----+-------------|
  |  00 | foo         |
  |  01 | bar         |
  |  02 | much longer |
  |-----+-------------|
There's probably a way to make org-mode dynamically resize tables as you type, without requiring the use of TAB, but I'm not sure if that's always desirable.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#28

Post by kasey_junk »

rtpg wrote: post #26
tptacek wrote: post #3

Part 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…

This feels like a post-facto explanation that gives way too much credit to Gruber as a language designer. I find it hard to assume that Markdown is extremely well thought-through considering the fact that we didn't even get a grammar for the language, just an implementation that would be considered super broken in any other language.

This implies that Markdown is designed as a language, which would have things like grammars and can be reasoned about with proofs and the lambda calculas etc.

Instead, Markdown should be thought of as a convention. A convention that allows for automated translation of ascii text into html. Further, instead of thinking of Markdown as designed think of it as evolved.

In the case of an evolved convention, we wouldn't expect formalism or even long term design. What we would expect and what Markdown is extremely good at is usefulness, high levels of adoption and ease of change. Which we do see. If your needs require formalism, or complex html features then Markdown is not the right tool for you.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#29

Post by breuleux »

baddox wrote: post #12
pmoriarty wrote: post #6

Earlier 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 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.

You can still have simpler table syntax that's nice to read but easier to maintain. For my own markup language (http://breuleux.net/quaint_demo/) I implemented this syntax:

    + Name    + Occupation
    | Alice   | Accountant
    | Bob     | Baker
    | Charles | Car salesman
Headers are easier to make and the last column does not require a trailing marker. It's still some work to align columns other than the last, but that's not a requirement and I'd still much rather have a non-aligned ASCII table than nothing at all.

Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)

#30

Post by BerislavLopac »

stormbrew wrote: post #23
BerislavLopac wrote: post #4

Markdown. 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…

Since when does something have to have a standard syntax to be a language? I mean, if you said "it's not a programming language" because it's not really executable in even a limited sense, I'd get that, but to say it's not a language -- a means of communicating information -- is just absurd. There's no standard BASIC, and there are almost certainly hundreds if not thousands of variants of it, but no one would say it'…

No, I meant a "markup language". And you're right -- Markdown is not "a means of communicating information"; it's a script that converts one form of information to another.
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