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If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

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Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#161

Post by DidYaWipe »

thangalin wrote: post #115
hamsterbase wrote: post #98

When it comes to web archiving, I've found that Markdown has some real limitations. Sure, it's great for basic text, but it struggles with things like embedded content and non-standard layouts. Try archiving a Twitter thread or an app-style webpage in Markdown, and you'll see what I mean. It just doesn't capture the full picture. That's why I've come to prefer formats like webarchive, mhtml, or single HTML files for…

> [Markdown] struggles with things like embedded content and non-standard layouts. I don't share that experience. I typeset all these documents using Markdown with pandoc's div extension, transformed into XHTML, and then passed to ConTeXt: * https://impacts.to/downloads/lowres/impacts.pdf * https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow... * https://pdfhost.io/v/4FeAGGasj_SepiSolar_Highlevel_Software_..…

Those are all PDFs. Why, if Markdown is so great?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#162

Post by DidYaWipe »

misterspaceman wrote: post #52

I've landed on a workflow that I like a lot, and have shown to several people on my team. I use Google Drive for Desktop, which maps the G:\ drive to Google Drive. From there, I use VS Code for Markdown editing. Google Docs now supports Markdown files, so if I need to convert the Markdown file to Word or PDF, I just open it in Docs and download it in the format I need. (Pandoc also works for this, as the author menti…

But why should you need to convert it? Why does no one call out the giant problem with Markdown: the lack of READERS?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#163

Post by DidYaWipe »

huqedato wrote: post #31

My pain is that I couldn't find a decent md viewer for Windows: free, fast, simple, no distractions. Imagine notepad. I have to open my md files with VSCode or Notepad++ (nasty view).

EXACTLY. Open-source projects are rife with Markdown, but why? There are almost no VIEWERS for it. It's irritating as shit.

After years of looking, I finally ended up with Marked (for Mac). When you ask for a Markdown reader in any forum, you get nothing but suggestions for EDITORS, which happen to have a preview pane. But what is it "previewing," when everybody's just reading these things as plain text with the formatting codes embedded in them?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#164

Post by DidYaWipe »

florbnit wrote: post #37
huqedato wrote: post #31

My pain is that I couldn't find a decent md viewer for Windows: free, fast, simple, no distractions. Imagine notepad. I have to open my md files with VSCode or Notepad++ (nasty view).

Easy fix, just write your md files in HTML, that way they are easy to read, and when you need to look at the markdown you can just use a converter.

That's sarcasm, right?

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#165

Post by drexlspivey »

1propionyl wrote: post #148
labster wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly plaintext has a pretty bad record as a format, with all of the UTF-16, Latin-2, Shift JIS, and so on. I’d suggest paper, or for true archival storage, parchment and stone.

Honestly paper, parchment and stone have a pretty bad record as a format. They either degrade or even if preserved can become unreadable (e.g. Linear B) without a surviving linguistic community. Even when the text survives and is rediscovered, translations produced with century-scale gaps often lose subtext or connotation that would still have registered across a narrower gap. I'd suggest an unbroken chain of oral tr…

I’d suggest stone tablets

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#167

Post by jorams »

hartator wrote: post #24

The only drawback of Markdown is images. GitHub-flavored Markdown is so popular because you can really easy inline them. You don't have to worry about storing them, linking them correctly, and you can even paste to the Markdown field. There is no elegant solution like this in actual Markdown.

> The only drawback of Markdown is images.

> GitHub-flavored Markdown is so popular because you can really easy inline them.

I'm not sure what you mean. GitHub-flavored Markdown has pretty much exactly the same image syntax as every other Markdown flavor.

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#169

Post by WA »

tengwar2 wrote: post #44

The 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…

Works in Commonmark:

    Some text and this is important

Re: If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown

#170

Post by ysleepy »

geokon wrote: post #139

It 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…

MediaWiki has one of the worst syntaxes and formalisations out there. I've been trying to render wikipedia pages on and off for more than 10 years and there is no independent parser covering the whole syntax and magic behaviour.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers

There is only parsoid, developed for the visual editor and that took pretty much a decade to build with much pain and suffering.

This is not the answer.

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