31–40 of 52 posts
I like markdown. I dislike the use of brackets () to delimit links. I would have preferred angle brackets for links. Brackets are reserved delimiters in RFC3986 (etc) whereas angle brackets are recommended for delimiting URIs.
CSS is so much more designer-friendly than LaTeX stylesheets...
Anybody use textile here?
I used it before I discovered Markdown. The syntax for code was very annoying: . But I still miss the easy distinction between emphasis (underscores) and strong emphasis (asterisks). Markdown makes both symbols behave identically, which I think is wasteful.
A *simple* example.
pre. 10 print "hello"
20 goto 10
And that's that, except for @inline@ code.
I find Markdown best for generating documents/documentation, and Textile best for generating styled web copy.
I really dig Markdown. But this nasty voice inside my head is saying "5 years from now, you're gonna wish you just did this in troff." Or for better and worse, it will evolve into troff.
Two opposing points: (1) on reddit, I'll often check the markup result, going back and forth (esp checking URLs - probably less important for other writing), and that seems inefficient. I did the same with LaTeX; (2) when I read the text in the rendered format, I'll pick up different typos, perhaps because the line-spacing and font are different and so my eyes parse it differently (like that trick with "of" doubled at end and start of a line).
For a year, I used a homegrown markup language for uni notes. It was fun to use, seemed helpful, but I think was primarily self-indulgent. Maybe I should try it again - I'm currently using either plaintext for documentation (which isn't really clear enough); or open office Word (which takes forever to startup, doesn't feel accessible (can't just cat or head or tail or more or less or grep it), has non-vi keybindings and generally is a pain (though I complement their job of copying MS Word).
Finally - I'm kinda surprised at markdown's success (and it really is successful). I would expect WYSIWYG to be more user-friendly. I think one factor is that markup is optional in the context where it's been successful (like reddit). In other words, it may be "successful" because (1) it's not actually needed or used much (I mean, typos/grammos are endemic online, right?) (2) it has the gentlest possible learning curve if you do want to use it. Does this mean it would be terrible at more serious uses? Or that it is ideal to disrupt incumbent formatting methods? (disrupt defined: "initially worse at key features, but has features appealing to different users such as convenience/price/accessibility").
It would be interesting to measure the percentage of reddit comments that actually use any markdown at all. I think it would be very low, something like 1-2%
BTW: You had my vote at ZX81 is that wrong?
i'm going to do a shameless plug for my github project here because it's quite related but not large enough to dedicate an entire thread to it. it converts DOM > markdown on the client. https://github.com/leeoniya/reMarked.js the stated goal is to integrate into existing WYSIWYG html editors to produce markdown output. kind of like Markdownify, but on the client. yay markdown! :D
Markdown is exactly what we needed but there weren't any good JS WYSIWYG editors available, so I hacked one together.
If you like markdown you will LOVE using pandoc. I can't stress how wonderful things have been since I moved to pandoc. http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
1) Proper reference support. In LaTeX you can use things like \ref{fig:foo} to insert autonumbers for things like Figure X and Table Y. (Which is awesome, because if you move a figure, you don't have to change all of your numbers around.) There's no Pandoc markdown equivalent, so this gets lost if I convert to e.g. HTML. I have to work around this with a script that looks for this LaTeX snippet and does the counters before passing to Pandoc.
2) Better footnote output for LaTeX. Right now, if you use a [^foo] footnote mark twice, you will get two \footnote{}'s in your LaTeX (and therefore a repeated footnote message in your output) instead of a \footnotemark for the second one.
3) Better metadata. Both Jekyll and MMD are so much more flexible about the metadata you add at the top of a document; Pandoc seems to think the only items I'll ever need are author, title, and date. If I could only add things like addresses, enclosures, salutation lines, and extra variables my templates could adjust to, I could produce more sensible templates for formats like business letters.
These are the benefits of LaTex - logical rather than physical structure. But LaYeX, strikingly beautiful though its output is, has not taken off outside computer science journal articles. Two opposing points: (1) on reddit, I'll often check the markup result, going back and forth (esp checking URLs - probably less important for other writing), and that seems inefficient. I did the same with LaTeX; (2) when I read th…
I really dig Markdown. But this nasty voice inside my head is saying "5 years from now, you're gonna wish you just did this in troff." Or for better and worse, it will evolve into troff.
Well, apparently pandoc can convert Markdown into groff. I don't know if it's troff compatible or if it has diverged, though.
Reluctantly, I agree that plain text documents are the way to go. I used to be a FrameMaker user.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are "extra" versions of Markdown that can be configured to respect literal line breaks. But if you rely on that, your text would not be compatible with other Markdown parsers. Markdown's default behavior of disregarding line breaks has two benefits: (1) you can keep your lines short without breaking paragraphs apart, and (2) putting each sentence (or long clause) in its own line plays very nicely with version c…
Yeah, respecting literal line breaks would break some things, but simply replacing the two spaces at the end of a line with something visible (maybe two underscores if that doesn't break something else) should work.