I don’t like Markdown because I don’t want to remember a syntax. Most normal people I know have no idea what Markdown even is. The idea that I can’t see my formatting when I’m writing is annoying. What’s the point? It’s like MD is writing code and to “see” the document, you have to run it. In other words what you see is not what you get — you only see what you get when “previewing.”
If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
131–140 of 282 posts
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#132The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…
I don’t quite follow the first bullet point. If you are doing public speaking, your client is rendering the slides, right? Won’t you be the one interpreting “accentuate?” (So you can make it fit whatever convention you want).
The fact that there is a “rendering the slides” step is the problem.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#133The other major alternative to consider is RTF. I standardised on that about 10y ago, planning for a 30y horizon. It is a more complex format than Markdown, still text-based, but biased towards WYSIWYG presentation and editing, while Markdown is usually not WYSIWYG in the editor. Both formats suffer from a lack of standardisation, though Markdown seems to have more problems in practice - I've never had an issue cause…
The nextcloud Markdown editor shows a live view while you edit... Its called "Notes"
You know what has live view all the time? RTF. What’s wrong with WYSIWYG?
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would add tables to that. Obsidian has some nice extensions to make working with tables easier, but it always feels janky.
Markdown is also missing: - Diagrams - Math - Any custom blocks - like Figures, algorithms, image boxes, etc - Numbered chapters / sections (Eg Chapter 1, Appendix A, etc). - Semantic references For readmes, thats fine I guess. But I miss all those features when I'm writing proper blog posts, articles and documentation. There are various hacky workarounds. But as soon as you start using bespoke markdown extensions, y…
i do believe obsidian support all those (well maybe not all)
but thats added 'on top' of basic markdown, so when you open your markdown file in some other program it looks weird
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in, and almost every screen we look at is nowadays HTML, including the code editor. On a ` element, calling document.execCommand('bold') will make selected text bold in WYSIWYG mode. See https://jsfiddle.net/z0umpb3x/12/ for the concept. The main idea here is that I don't want to know any syntax like RTF, nor I want to use any tools.
> Why not HTML? Browsers have native basic WYSIWYG editing built in Can you point me to a page in Firefox that I can use offline to WYSIWYG edit a hypertext document without needing to use the developer console to edit raw HTML?
If you want to do that offline, then you shouldn't use a browser but a HTML editor. There are plenty https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#136Indeed, I also realized that bookmarks are worthless on the long run. When choosing a note taking / knowledge management app, the main decision point was if it has a Firefox extension that can capture a web page into markdown and automatically save into my notes. I used to use Joplin, lately switched to Obsidian. Both offer this functionality.
What drove you to switch to Obsidian? I'm considering it myself and have been playing around with Obsidian the past couple of days after about 4 years of Joplin, 2 of which with a self hosted Joplin Server.
I'm tired of basic features being missing and extensions breaking because they're no longer maintained, and basic features like linking between notes while writing a note not being built in.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#137Mediawiki. Let's balance durability against functionality. MW gets you a massively scalable doc store that does not need much room. Most MW instances are MySQL/MariaDB backed and the schema etc is very well described. Keep it plain text for "notes" but a MW will be easily discoverable for quite some time from now.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
encouraging..
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#138But I hate Markdown.
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#139It feels like a long term solution would be to use a markdown that is both easy to write (not RTF or XHTML), but has a defined grammar in some standard format (ex: EBNF). Most platform/languages will have a parser and so you can whip up a "renderer" or converter trivially at any point.
The only markup I'm finding with a grammar is MediaWiki (sort of..)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
Even Djot doesn't seem to have one. Weird..
Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
#140But I hate Markdown.
Then use any of the plethora of alternative text formatting tools (TeX, for one).