51–60 of 99 posts
Alternatives: asciidoc. Maps easily to docbook, and has a heap of extra features.
The asciidoctor project also has browser extensions for rendering which are really nice. For the lazy: http://asciidoctor.org/
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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…
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…
On the other hand, I find Markdown (or ReST) easy to learn, to write and to read.
As to being a niche, there are probably around 20M software developers in the world (probably only 10-20% of them doing web), and several times over of other kinds of technical people. So even a markup language that only targets technical people who are not web developers would be addressing a few tens of millions of people. A niche for sure, but far from a small niche. These markup formats certainly cater to many more people than, say, Ruby or Python.
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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.
Is that a correct history of Markdown? It certainly seems to have been designed to be easily readable and writable for laypeople.
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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.
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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…
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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 requir…
Yeah, the alignment of columns is a big issue. If you have 100 rows, and add another with a cell that is longer than any other cell in that column, you've got to either edit 100 rows or live with a much harder to read table.
No really. It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on each side of words in text boxes when we want to emphasize something. Are we cavemen?
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Technology has moved on. We should no longer need to remember which combination of magic symbols we need to make a bulleted list or whatever.
There are often helpers to insert those magic symbols. That's great, but then why keep showing us the magic symbols? Do you want me to care that s represent italics? Will including this second cause this fragment to be italicized? How do you show an asterisk without it meaning intalics? Grrr...
Markdown and all the other Markdown-esque formats need to be consigned to the history books. No really. It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on each side of words in text boxes when we want to emphasize something. Are we cavemen? (Following was added after initial posting) Technology has moved on. We should no longer need to remember which combination of magic symbols we need to make a bulleted list or w…
Well, essentially, yes.
What do you suggest we use, then?
Markdown and all the other Markdown-esque formats need to be consigned to the history books. No really. It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on each side of words in text boxes when we want to emphasize something. Are we cavemen? (Following was added after initial posting) Technology has moved on. We should no longer need to remember which combination of magic symbols we need to make a bulleted list or w…
>Are we cavemen? Well, essentially, yes. What do you suggest we use, then?