Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Markdown is holding you back

newsletter.bphogan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 194 posts

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#181

Post by SR2Z »

hinkley wrote: post #167
coffeefirst wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not even typesetting. It just formalizes the semantic parts of any well written long document.

It holds people back because it's not meant to be a typesetting tool. It's mostly meant to look good in its raw format.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#182

Post by badbotty »

dwaltrip wrote: post #175

> Why semantic markup matters > ... > Web developers already went through all this with HTML. Prior to HTML5, you had as a logical container. But HTML5 introduced , , , and many other elements that described the content. Isn't the semantic web super dead? As in dead, buried, and decorated with countless generations of moss and lichen growing on its gravestone? --- Edit: Huh, I guess it isn't as dead as I thought! htt…

I find the semantic web stuff is really interesting but it seems to have more success where there are complex up-front data modeling and collaboration requirements, maybe between orgs. There is a Genome database out there for semantic web and I've heard of banks using it in complex fraud detection systems.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#183

Post by agoose77 »

nickledave wrote: post #40

Really weird to see this person mention MyST as a form of Markdown, and then go on to talk about reStructuredText as their first example of a markup language "that gives you more control over structure than ... markdown". The whole point of MyST is to provide a markdown-like alternative to rST. It literally has directives, roles, structural semantics, etc. It just doesn't have the unlearnable syntax of rST and the so…

Thanks for making this point! I'm chiming in just to add that the Jupyter Book project that builds MyST tooling is now using a new TypeScript stack instead of Sphinx, for any interested newcomers!

But yes, ^this. We are building around a shareable AST precisely because structure really matters.

(I'm a core developer from Jupyter Book, the team that builds the new MyST stack — see https://jupyterbook.org/stable/community/history/ and https://mystmd.org/guide/background)!

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#184

Post by hananova »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #119
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…

While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't. I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been…

But markdown does not require custom tools. The entire point of md is that you CAN use a renderer to make it pretty, but just reading the raw text in a text editor also works just fine.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#185

Post by immibis »

littlestymaar wrote: post #92
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

> I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. Reddit surely doesn't, and I'd be very surprised if github did. In practice, in any place you want untrusted users writing markdown stuff for formatting, you cannot allow arbitrary HTML for security reasons.

Why's anyone still using Reddit? I heard they just locked down their API again, to verified developers now.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#186

Post by zelphirkalt »

hananova wrote: post #184
zelphirkalt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't. I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been…

But markdown does not require custom tools. The entire point of md is that you CAN use a renderer to make it pretty, but just reading the raw text in a text editor also works just fine.

Same can be said about reStructuredText, AsciiDoc and many more.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#187

Post by kiicia »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #146
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.

It was always THE main feature, that you can have something from both worlds in a win-win scenario. I don’t understand why someone would invent new html instead of appreciating markdown for it’s elegant simplicity

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#188

Post by kiicia »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #186
hananova wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But markdown does not require custom tools. The entire point of md is that you CAN use a renderer to make it pretty, but just reading the raw text in a text editor also works just fine.

Same can be said about reStructuredText, AsciiDoc and many more.

But none of those is as simple and elegant as markdown. You can write html in text editor like in ages past, but what would be the point of doing that.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#189

Post by fastasucan »

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.…

>why bother with Markdown at all?

Because a little html is less html than "everything in html".

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#190

Post by littlestymaar »

immibis wrote: post #185
littlestymaar wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. Reddit surely doesn't, and I'd be very surprised if github did. In practice, in any place you want untrusted users writing markdown stuff for formatting, you cannot allow arbitrary HTML for security reasons.

Why's anyone still using Reddit? I heard they just locked down their API again, to verified developers now.

Network effect, the same reason why the magnificent seven are worth more than a trillion dollar each.
Post reply on HN