131–140 of 167 posts
We have a binary and universal format for plain text (utf8) that is extended all the time with additional emojis. But it seems almost unimaginable that we ever get a binary text format that also allows simple semantic markup, like emphasis, tables, hyperlinks, amounts, dates, and phone numbers. It's 2022, and really, we should be able to copy a paragraph from an email with a table in it into a chat app and have it ju…
>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…
The author is also a Sanity employee and, while I like the ideas behind the Sanity CMS, if you ever create a schema with an RTF field, you'll see the opposite extreme when you read the text back via GraphQL. If Markdown was created to make the source readable, Sanity exists to make content unreadable (via expansive nested JSON for even simple tags like ). It's pretty easy for a paragraph of text to take 200 lines of…
>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…
Yeah, I'm well aware that markdown didn't happen in a vacuum and was inspired by plain text formatting conventions. But there is only that much you can cover in an already too long blog post. It wouldn't have changed my argument much either. It wouldn't be historically accurate to say that Markdown existed before Gruber/Swartz, like it wouldn't be accurate to say that HTML existed before Tim-Berners Lee, even though SGML and such was a thing.
I'm not arguing for a more proprietary binary word processor format either. Or that we should type JSON. It's actually possible to have decent WYSIWYG editors that does their job. And they won't get better if don't put our minds to them.
The point you're missing in this reply is the legitime user-unfriendly experience of markdown and the challenges it poses for developers who are trying to solve things for their teams and customers today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is also a Sanity employee and, while I like the ideas behind the Sanity CMS, if you ever create a schema with an RTF field, you'll see the opposite extreme when you read the text back via GraphQL. If Markdown was created to make the source readable, Sanity exists to make content unreadable (via expansive nested JSON for even simple tags like ). It's pretty easy for a paragraph of text to take 200 lines of…
I was astonished at the length of that article as I kept reading and thinking the same, ‘isn’t this what he just said before???’ I’m happy to read long-form but I feel that piece would have benefited greatly from substantial editing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huh? Markdown was created in 2004: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown The tools you invoke, which predate Markdown considerably, and mentioning 1970s don’t make sense in that light.
You write: > Huh? Markdown was created in 2004 … Did you read OP? > > It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. Markdown is a formalisation of conventions which were in common in email & news long before HTML even existed.
I find this article to be sort of ridiculous. Sure, some of the critiques about the various flavors of Markdown might be valid (but I would posit that for the non-technical users the author claims to be so concerned about, the chances of them regularly having to interact with more than one flavor (and no, Slack and Reddit don’t count), is extremely low), but the whole piece seems to be an advertisement for the author…
I'm kinda bummbed out that the post read as an ad. I was super nervous to publish this because it I knew I was poking at something that's near and dear to a lot of devs (myself included). But I have experienced enough friction with Markdown in the real world and wanted to explore poking what I see as the status quo. And it seems to have sparked some conversation, which was what I wanted. I'm truly not trying to “hawk” something, but I believe the thinking that went into Portable Text can provide value and I'm sort of putting it out there for people to make up their own minds.
To your point: I agree, Markdown is for writers, but only for some writers. Maybe I didn't get that across, but it is kinda amazing that it has become so ubiquotos in all its shapes and colors.
But it comes with these actual constrains and challenges that I feel a lot of developers aren't really being upfront or honest about. The simplicity comes with trade-offs that just adds complexity elsewhere. Either for people who don't desire to learn specialized syntax or developers who have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to parse it in a sensible manner to get their job done.
I think author misses the point completely. Markdown is for writing not for editing. If you want to focus on writing, text, and content instead of on bells and whistles with formatting and typesetting it's really hard to go easier than Markdown. Sure, Markdown is overused. Probably one shouldn't use it for heavily linked content, where one has to show examples, cross-link, check references, verify the sources etc. an…
Markdown is for writing not for editing. If you want to focus on writing, text, and content instead of on bells and whistles with formatting and typesetting it's really hard to go easier than Markdown.
One minor note: jekyll definitely was not first to introduce front matter (though they may have introduced yaml front matter?). I am sure that at least pyblosxom had it earlier: https://pyblosxom.github.io/Documentation/1.5/writing_entrie... Here's the earliest surviving commit showing blog entry front matter in 2002: https://github.com/pyblosxom/pyblosxom/blob/f80cdb42eb37ee0e... My recollection is that blosxom (a p…
Thanks for these links! I tried to track the origin down, but there's only so much digging one could do. But I think it safe to say that Jekyll _popularlized_ the YAML-style frontmatter.
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Ah, I thought we're talking typewriter-old times. Yes, sure, I do remember the proliferation of weird wiki syntaxes, and I also remember seeing markdown as a breath of fresh air in its readability and intuitiveness. I do believe the same as the poster before me, that markdown is the closest among them to what could be seen either in typewriting, or on usenet. Asciidoc and rst have some of it, but break the illusion b…
I would argue that rst is much closer to how things were done with typewriters. One example: I can not think of one document written on a typewriter that indicated a heading with #, but just a brief search for typewriter document images will get you ones with "--" underlines as headings. For me that is actually still the biggest difference between rst and Markdown, and I still think underlines look much more like hea…
I think I need to call BS here. Typing out a phrase, taking your hands off the keyboard to then fight with wysiwyg is a step back and unusable. What is a max typing speed doing this? I'm curious if anyone can break 20wpm doing that. The mouse controls for formatting are simply not usable for anyone wanting to effectively type above 30wpm
So that aside. I thought markdown was a unification of the absurd number of wiki languages that were coming out. There is tracwiki, wikipedia's, mediawiki, countless more with different variations of markdown. They all have HTML knock-offs because html is overly verbose for quickly typing out a simple wiki page that us mostly lists and headers.