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The Curse of Markdown

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Re: The Curse of Markdown

#101

Post by herpdyderp »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #77

Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown . There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. The…

> They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day.

This is exactly why I ditched WYSIWYG long before I knew how to code.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#102

Post by kstrauser »

vitiral wrote: post #97

I think markdown is poorly designed, especially in terms of ease of parsing (human AND machine!) I've written my own markup language, I'd love ANYONE'S feedback, either good or bad https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt

Why did you make the decisions you did? My very first impression was “this looks different from Markdown for the sake of being different”. You say yours is easier to parse. Can you give some examples of when that might be try? Things like [*bold text] seem like they’d be harder to parse.

(It’s hard to communicate tone here. My intent above was to sound curious, not dismissive.)

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#103

Post by belak »

scblock wrote: post #94
briandoll wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this -- we tried to work with JG to create and support a Markdown standard when we formalized "GitHub flavored Markdown" and got the exact opposite reaction many of us expected. Even using the name in any context was seen as a slight. More context: https://github.blog/engineering/user-experience/a-formal-spe... https://github.github.com/gfm/

Dude created a simple tool based on email conventions of the time and released it to the world for free and it's still with us, used all over. And you're here crying that he didn't want to work with you? Did you think he was somehow obligated to? How incredibly entitled. It's open source, so you do what you do. That's the good and bad of it. No one owes you a god damned thing.

I think you're missing much of the context and are misrepresenting what happened.

As far as I'm aware, there was no crying he didn't want to work with people, but there was a frustration that he was not open to having a Markdown "standard". To the point where he actively opposed efforts to standardize it, at least under the name Markdown[1].

This is legally and technically fine, as he owns a trademark for Markdown, but when you combine the inconsistent application of that trademark (GitHub Flavored Markdown is seemingly fine, but Common Markdown was not), along with him calling it "Jeff Atwood's crusade" and mocking the effort[2], it's not a great look and resulted in quite a few frustrated people.

As an open source project, you're right that he doesn't owe anything to anyone, but that doesn't mean people have to be entirely happy about how the situation was handled either.

[1]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

[2]: https://soundcloud.com/thetalkshow/ep-88-cat-pictures-side-1, around 1:15

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#104

Post by lmm »

fragmede wrote: post #91
lmm wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. > They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold. They do not. No normal person has ever said how happy they were that they could highlight text and click a b…

forum? Instagram is the mainstream product you're looking for, and the text rendering there is decidedly GUI based and not markdown-esque

Instagram does not offer "highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B". The normal way to put bold text on Instagram is to use an online "bold text generator" and copy-paste from there. I struggle to imagine that it's that way because people like doing that.

From a quick search only "mainstream social media" which offers native bold functionality is WhatsApp. And it uses markdown-style.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#105

Post by MrVandemar »

wrboyce wrote: post #80
TheRealPomax wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are multiple markdown specs. This is one of them, probably the most well-known, but certainly not the only one.

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/927/

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#107

Post by zelphirkalt »

aylmao wrote: post #26
kccqzy wrote: post #16

Markdown has always supported direct raw HTML in it. I don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost. Don't be a Markdown purist. Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML. He doesn't even do multi-paragraph ordered lists in Markdown, and chooses to write instead. And he also uses for clickable ima…

On the note of embedding HTML in Markdown, I think it'd be cool if it were just as easy to embed Markdown in HTML. Something akin to a tag. Markdown makes it easy to write formatted content at the cost of initial compiler setup, HTML is 0-cost setup but takes some effort to write formatted content. With a tag one could start with vanilla HTML at zero cost, use all its features straight away, but not have to type HTML…

It will probably never happen, because the browser would need to translate to HTML anyway, before rendering it. At that point it could simply be done beforehand on the server, not putting more tasks onto the browser and adding the complexities of HTML inside md inside HTML inside md ... and so on.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#108

Post by fragmede »

cdchn wrote: post #98
fragmede wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because, it is really awkward

All the hoops you have to jump through with Markdown seem more awkward to me than a few extra characters.

but you jump through those hoops during setup, vs seven extra characters every paragraph

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#109

Post by latexr »

belak wrote: post #103
scblock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude created a simple tool based on email conventions of the time and released it to the world for free and it's still with us, used all over. And you're here crying that he didn't want to work with you? Did you think he was somehow obligated to? How incredibly entitled. It's open source, so you do what you do. That's the good and bad of it. No one owes you a god damned thing.

I think you're missing much of the context and are misrepresenting what happened. As far as I'm aware, there was no crying he didn't want to work with people, but there was a frustration that he was not open to having a Markdown "standard". To the point where he actively opposed efforts to standardize it, at least under the name Markdown[1]. This is legally and technically fine, as he owns a trademark for Markdown, b…

> As an open source project

But it’s not an open-source project. It’s a download link to a Perl script which is never updated and effectively no one uses.

There’s currently zero value to the code he wrote or the reference in his page. The only thing of worth that remains of his original implementation is the concept and the most basic syntax.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#110

Post by kccqzy »

the_af wrote: post #100
marxisttemp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listen to a few podcasts that Gruber is a friend of, but he’s always struck me as a bit vapid and haughty. He always seems to reference his own influence, which he seems to have earned by…coming up with a handful of basic text markup syntax and writing Apple hagiographies?

I always wondered why anybody would "support" or subscribe to the microblog of someone whose profession seems to be "write about Apple, mostly defending them". And not in any detailed long form, either.

I don't enjoy the fact that he's obviously biased and defends Apple too often, and occasionally shows his lack of technical understanding. But this man's job is writing and he writes better than 90% of blog posts posted on HN. And he has plenty of long form posts. His iPhone reviews are often longer than most tech journalists' reviews. I often disagree with the contents of his writing, but I do have a soft spot for people who wield language well.
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