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Markdown is holding you back

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141–150 of 194 posts

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#141

Post by pessimizer »

It really is terrible. I've hated it ever since it was introduced, but it "won" before anyone ever adopted it, because there were webprogramming Apple/DaringFireball fanatics that pushed it everywhere they possibly could, and demanded that you acknowledge it as an ideal outcome.

The Apple/DaringFireball fanatics have gone, and the web programmers learned how to really program because they had node as an option, but we've been stuck with this ugly, limited non-standardized format.

I'm an AsciiDoc partisan. I think we should just standardize a subset of AsciiDoc that does everything that markdown does and let people just implement that subset if they want. AsciiDoc gets a bit hairy when you get into the weeds, but if there were some sort of graduated standard that layered on features, you could learn as slowly as you wanted, and only by necessity. AsciiDoc gives you what you need as a base to automate typesetting basically everthing, as far as semantics go.

edit: I have to admit that I do not like AsciiDoctor, but it's just because I hate introducing Ruby dependencies. The people behind AsciiDoctor seem really great.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#142

Post by tcfhgj »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #88
nicoburns wrote: post #6

This article doesnt consider Typst, which IMO ought to be the first port of call if Markdown isnt sufficient for your needs.

I think Typst looks really interesting for some scenarios, but inadequate for others. I like RST a lot for Python documentation, because of all the directives for types, admonitions, and lots of domain-specific stuff. I wouldn't use RST if I'm writing a book, or a research paper. In the same way, Typst looks like a great candidate for those last examples, but is likely unsuitable for documenting a library written in…

> In the same way, Typst looks like a great candidate for those last examples, but is likely unsuitable for documenting a library written in Python.

why though?

Would you categorize Markdown as unsuitable as well? if so, why?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#144

Post by henrebotha »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #134
judahmeek wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the trade-offs with AsciiDoc that would make you choose Markdown instead?

Not op, but markdown is much more likely to render well in different contexts, without post processing. My editor understands markdown, GitHub understands markdown, the link preview renderer in understands markdown. It’s the lowest common denominator

That's true, and it's why we're all using it. But those different renderers all support different ill-defined interpretations of Markdown. You can forget about all of them accepting raw HTML.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#145

Post by spopejoy »

Uhh isn't the main strength of md that it's human-friendly to write? Same for yaml. In both cases, dramatically worse for processing, strictly weaker for semantics and rich formatting... And also doesn't make you want to kill yourself when you're editing it by hand.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#146

Post by ivanjermakov »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #93

The main point of Markdown is that it has a very important feature that other languages don't have: it's supported in a lot of places. Most of the alternatives mentioned in this thread or in the article are things that require custom tools, that can't be used in most of the places that currently do support markdown. It's common in a lot of places. Even Google Docs has a well hidden feature that allows you to paste ma…

Important and often underlooked feature of markdown is that it's very readable as plain text. A lot easier to read than say latex or html.

I like to think of markdown as a high level markup language that gets compiled down to html. There is always a fallback to write html directly in markdown.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#147

Post by ctenb »

I'm surprised Pandoc markdown is not mentioned. You can make that semi structured quite easily, and write your own transformations using lua. It's powerful enough to write math papers and export into both pdf and html.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#148

Post by bccdee »

hysan wrote: post #131
bccdee wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of the author's other suggestions are portable either. So what if pandoc markdown is only understood by pandoc's tooling? DocBook is only understood by DocBook tooling. The difference is that pandoc markdown is already 95% similar to every other flavour of markdown, so migrating to a new system (if necessary) would be relatively simple. Also, the difference is that XML is a pain to write and I'm not sure semanti…

Maybe portable isn’t the right word. I read portable as meaning the format’s semantics are consistent across platforms. The way I read the author’s complaint was that once you start tacking on extensions to markdown, you run into the problem of seeing if other markdown platforms being able to support your variant of markdown. Hence the part about CommonMark vs GitHub-Flavored Markdown vs etc. Having actually run into…

> I read portable as meaning the format’s semantics are consistent across platforms.

By that definition, a format which is only implemented on one platform is 100% consistent. I agree Markdown is uniquely fragmented, but it's also uniquely widespread.

Markdown is an extensible core for writing platform-specific languages. I think comparing markdown in general to something like DocBook is comparing apples to oranges. Instead compare (e.g.) Pandoc's specific markdown variant to DocBook.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#149

Post by Terretta »

throwaway150 wrote: post #49
dschuessler wrote: post #10

You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

> You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them. That is well known and I am sure the author is aware of it. The problem they are describing is not whether HTML is technically allowed inside Markdown. It's that when you are writing Markdown, you are writing Markdown, not HTML, and that comes with some problems. > It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. In theory, yes.…

> The whole point of choosing Markdown is that you do not want to spend your time typing

, , and the rest. You want to write in Markdown, with only occasional HTML when absolutely necessary.

Why is that a problem?

> If the solution to Markdown's limitations is routinely switching to HTML, then...

Why would you do that, instead of only switching if you had to?

Why would the alternative be "just HTML" and write all the nonsense you said one doesn't have to?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#150

Post by paradox460 »

I recently moved my personal writing to John MacFarlane's djot. It's a markup language that grew out of his markdown improvements blogpost, where he explored the issues, and possible fixes, he discovered while creating the common mark standard.

I've no regrets since then

https://pdx.su/blog/2025-06-28-writing-in-djot/

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