Yes, Markdown is really bad. I really wonder why it's so much more popular than Creole, Textile etc.
Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
41–50 of 99 posts
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I haven't seen it used outside of Rails apps, but have you ever tried Slim? I understand there's a similar tool for Node.js called Jade. http://slim-lang.com/ table tr th Col1 Header! th Col2 Header! tr td Col1 Value... td Col2 Value... Renders to HTML.
Slim/Jade/HAML etc are templating languages, they're not designed for writing text at all - they're almost the opposite of markdown et all.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#43Part 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…
What parts of Markdown are closer to conventions of ASCII-text email than the equivalent Creole? Two spaces at the end of a line? List renumbering?
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#44Part 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.
I never create tables in HTML any more. If I ever want an HTML table, I create it in org-mode and export it. It's just so much faster to create what you want.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#45Earlier 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…
>Github can render org-mode files to HTML directly if checked into a repo
They also support ASCIIDoc, ReST, MediaWiki markup, Creole, etc.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#46Does anyone else prefer txt2tags [1]? It also works.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I haven't seen it used outside of Rails apps, but have you ever tried Slim? I understand there's a similar tool for Node.js called Jade. http://slim-lang.com/ table tr th Col1 Header! th Col2 Header! tr td Col1 Value... td Col2 Value... Renders to HTML.
Slim/Jade/HAML etc are templating languages, they're not designed for writing text at all - they're almost the opposite of markdown et all.
I wouldn't say they're the opposite of Markdown, but that's not really the point I was getting at anyway. The poster I was replying to was saying that two of his issues with using HTML to write documents were the verbosity and the escaping. Slim solves those two issues.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#48I'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 (la…
the first wiki I wrote used textile, I added wikipedia-style links and it was about perfect. I still can't understand why markdown overtook it in popularity.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#49Part 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.
Actually the markdown page on his site mentions exactly that as markdown's intention.
> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
Re: Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually the markdown page on his site mentions exactly that as markdown's intention. > The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing…
Worth adding that it's said that since 2004, when archive.org first noticed the page.