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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)

#71

Post by jamessb »

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…

Not all markdown text is written with the intention of being converted to HTML. Pandoc can convert markdown to .pdf (via LaTeX), .doc, a slide-deck (using either LaTeX-Beamer or one the HTML presentation tools) etc.

Compared to LaTeX, markdown markup is less obtrusive: a single asterisk/double asterisk/double backtick interrupts the flow of text less than an \emph{} or \textbf{} or \textit{}. Since there's less noise, it's easier to proofread and edit the source document. [The same is true for HTML vs. markdown]

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

#72

Post by johnchristopher »

leoc wrote: post #56
kasey_junk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it's intended to be interpreted by computers, what's the point in avoiding precision? All a fuzzy specification does is make it probable that those interpretations will be mutually inconsistent and/or unintuitive and problematic and/or prone to crashes and security failures.

> If it's intended to be interpreted by computers, what's the point in avoiding precision?

Because markdown is for humans first and foremost, not computers. It can't be clearer than that.

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

#73

Post by 1971genocide »

pron wrote: post #53
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…

I'm a software developer, that is to say a technical person, but I don't really know HTML (well, other than a few basic tags) because, like most developers in the world, I don't do web development, and what I do know of HTML, I don't particularly like, certainly not for writing. 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 softwar…

I agree, I beauty of markdown is any layperson can read it while HTML in-spite being easier for web-developers is not the best tool to write documentation.

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

#74

Post by Retra »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #30
stormbrew wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Markdown isn't a means of communicating information?

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

#75

Post by sedev »

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.

"Markdown is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool… that converts the plain text formatting to HTML. […] 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… the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email."

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

I don't think it's far-fetched to say what tptacek did since it's dang close to what Gruber has always said about Markdown. Note that phrasing: it's not a language, it's a "plain text formatting syntax."

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

#76

Post by leoc »

johnchristopher wrote: post #72
leoc wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's intended to be interpreted by computers, what's the point in avoiding precision? All a fuzzy specification does is make it probable that those interpretations will be mutually inconsistent and/or unintuitive and problematic and/or prone to crashes and security failures.

> If it's intended to be interpreted by computers, what's the point in avoiding precision? Because markdown is for humans first and foremost, not computers. It can't be clearer than that.

How could it be for humans any more or less than any other language which is designed primarily to be written by humans and then interpreted by computers?

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

#77

Post by ilchenearly »

To me, one big issue is that you cannot use markdown to present everything, for example, one cannot use it to produce something like 
`d`
, I mean he cannot use ``d`` to do that, right? Also you cannot write
```
```markdown
## HEADER
```
```
to produce a fenced code block which contains a markdown source code for code block.
Also, different markdown editor use different markdown parser. So, same source code will be rendered differently in different editor.

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

#78

Post by shurcooL »

Markdown is many different things to many people. I love Markdown, but I mean the GitHub Flavored Markdown. Using plain Markdown would be very weird for me. So discussing flaws of plain Markdown seems pointless to me since I don't use it due to a much better variant being available.
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