I have been using Markdown for decade(s) at this point, and I have never felt held back. I love Markdown, I use it daily, and I like that it can be instantly understood in its raw format by anyone and rendered cleaning to rich text easily.
Markdown is holding you back
191–194 of 194 posts
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It’s called markdown because it contains simple markup. Some of that is structural, no argument, but it’s also layout. Just enough to keep readers on board with what you’re saying.
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#193The 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…
> Markdown could be improved in a similar way over time I think that is unlikely to happen any time soon. The problem is there isn't any kind of authority that can improve it. The closest we have is commonmark, which is more of a deacriptive specification rather than prescriptive.
The inventor of markdown, John Gruber (yes that John Gruber of daringfireball fame) has always distanced himself from any efforts to make it a "standard" too, in part why we ended up with the name "CommonMark" for that project...
> https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
> https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
Re: Markdown is holding you back
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been meaning to see how close I can come to Markdown syntax using SGML's SHORTREF and perhaps architectural forms.
Markdown inline syntax is straightforward to capture using SGML SHORTREF. What's more difficult (impossible) are things such as reference links where a markdown processor is supposed to pull text (the title of a link) from wherever it's defined before or after its usage. Haven't heard about archforms in a while ;) but it's not a technique for custom syntax, and since markdown is specified as a Wiki syntax with canoni…
I've use archforms in my custom markup before: https://r6.ca/HtmlAsSgml.html
For example added an attribute to turn all spaces into non-breaking spaces, and used archforms to remove the attribute afterwards.
But yeah, maybe for Makrdown you don't need archforms. On the other hand, perhaps there is some super clever way to use archforms to get your reference links working.