Earlier quoted context omitted.
A generic ASCII capable text viewer is enough to read markdown, that's the point ;)
only if the markdown consists of 100% ASCII... unless you have a different definition of "view" than me
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Markdown is holding you back
161–170 of 194 posts
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#162The tenor of the article is more like: Markdown is holding LLMs back.
And it assumes the semantic enrichment comes for free.
While I agree that other formats allow for that and it's nice to see the solid options: nope, nobody in our team has the time to do such a chore and we are fine with the information we leave for each other.
It's analogous to the whining of the semantic web folks. The semantic web hasn't happened as a whole. Same problem there: who would curate all the data?
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#163The 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…
Yeah, I don't see the point of this article: Markdown has already won. I have some clients where I will send docs in MS Word/PDF format, but that kind of proves the point: the recipient sets the format. They may not explicitly say anything, but I'm not going to send something if there's a risk of receiving a "how do I open this?" Also, code blocks are the worst example of it's limitations: just use backticks. Sometim…
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Re: Markdown is holding you back
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
> I think comparing markdown in general to something like DocBook is comparing apples to oranges.
Hmm let me rephrase the issue I have with the comments in this thread. If your position is that markdown doesn’t belong in the same category as the others, then yeah, I agree. But I also think that’s basically rejecting the premise of the article and there isn’t a discussion to be had. If you disagree with the core premise, then it doesn’t matter what is said, there’s no discussion to be had.
However, the original parent comment is stating that the author’s assertion is false because you can extend markdown. I don’t see how that logic doesn’t run into the semantics and “portability” problems that the author is writing about.
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#165Being held back is the point.. WYSIWYM is a better ideal than more fonts, but it still tends towards trouble. It is hard enough to get engineers to write and maintain small amounts of correct comments without adding boilerplate metadata. I think everyone on this site is familiar with gripes against Jira but they are supposed to take a brain holiday when evaluating documentation mediums? Who is going to make sure previous and next topic are correct after the addition of a new topic? The great thing about absent fields is that they don't end up with bad content.
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#166By suggesting DITA as a valid alternative to Markdown, for any use, this has so completely lost the plot that it blows up whatever credibility Brian might have on the subject. It's disappointing, because I know of Brian and otherwise respect his work. Short of writing in raw Postscript, I can't think of a more completely different set of strengths, audiences, and applications. I had to get to a company with more than…
I'm really surprised I didn't see any mention of LwDITA yet. It can be expressed in XML, HTML, or Markdown. For us it is the sweet spot between the too little provided by Markdown, and the too much provided by DITA or DocBook
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#167The 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…
The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card. Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom. On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike…
The whole point is to dumb a problem down so that people can focus on substance instead of form. It’s typesetting for people who aren’t technical and to lower the barrier for technical people for documentation of what they’re working on so far that you can ridicule people who still refuse to document their shit.
Any time you can make a developer chose between belligerence or stupidity to explain their behavior, they will either change the behavior or go with belligerence because they’d rather be dead than thought stupid. In either case you have maneuvered them out of being able to continue to be obstructive to team dynamics.
So you “solve” social problems with technical solutions not by making the solution better, but by making it the dumbest thing ever so only an idiot wouldn’t understand it.
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#168I believe that Markdown shines because it is literally human language. It’s the equivalent of tearing a paper sheet from a notebook and writing stuff down. If I wanted formatted, semantic writing, I’d use LaTeX
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#169Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great. For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me. But in the end, no markup language will make you write bette…
Djot is another interesting alternative that tries to make Markdown more parsable and coherent: https://github.com/jgm/djot#rationale
I hadn't heard of that before but it looks like it solves a lot of my complaints about markdown.
I hope it gains more momentum.
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#170I am surprised TeX [1] and LaTeX (pronounced tech and lay-tech) are not mentioned in this post. When I was a physics undergrad it was required that we wrote our senior thesis in it as well as any studies we meant to publish. Interestingly, my lab worked closely with a lab from the chemistry department and apparently their standard was MS Word docs. I was given to understand that this setup was fairly universal for bo…
I was the only student who did the thesis in MS Word because why the fuck not. Of course I had to use a LaTeX font, and there was a bug with PDF export, but other than that, it was fine. Long ago I've read a study somewhere that people using LaTeX take more time and effort to accomplish same tasks compared to MS Word, but they are more happy about the process. Seems to match my impression that LaTeX is "by tinkerers,…
Documents written in the 1980s in LaTeX still compile and look great today. Good luck doing that with an old MS Word file, especially if it has equations in it.