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How Markdown took over the world

anildash.com

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Re: How Markdown took over the world

#331

Post by Linux-Fan »

pseudohadamard wrote: post #329
thangalin wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you quantify "much better"? I compiled a set of over 70 features offered by a variety of plain text formats: https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/ Are many features missing from the list? From what I can tell, objectively, plain text formats offer largely equivalent functionality.

Does anything need all those features though? If you need more than headings, bold, italic, quoted text, and code, you should probably be using HTML or Latex or something. So a better goodness-of-fit function would be is it easy to remember/use, and is it non-intrusive inline with the text?

I don't think anybody needs all of the features at once but people have different preferences. E.g. I typically do well without bold formatting (I only need one level of emphasis which is served well by italic) but I want tables, links and lists very often.

Also I like the WYSIWYG feature of Markdown where it has an advantage over the traditional Markup languages like HTML, LaTeX, groff etc. of being easier to read in the text file. Dedicated syntax highlighting can go a long way to make markup easier to read, though.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#332

Post by thaumasiotes »

VerifiedReports wrote: post #324
thaumasiotes wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You find MD files in every open-source project and lots of other places, but almost no viewers that render them as intended. Huh? If you find a markdown file in a project on Github, I have every confidence that it renders as intended in Github's markdown viewer.

Do you not realize you're in a browser, on a Web page, if you're on Github? And do you never actually clone the project to your machine and use it? When I sit down to actually use the project and I want to read the documentation, I want to double-click on the MD files and READ them. Not edit and preview, but read... with their intended formatting.

You might have difficulty doing that without using a browser, given that markdown renders to HTML.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#333

Post by janwillemb »

thangalin wrote: post #280
janwillemb wrote: post #230

The writeup does not mention Jeff Atwood (Stackoverflow founder) trying to convince Gruber to standardize markdown. Atwood approached him publicly in a series of blog posts, but Gruber kept silent, and if I remember correctly finally declined stating that he didn't want to spend time jumping through other persons' hoops. Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized, I still see this as an inspiring example of…

> Although it sucks that markdown is not standardized Does CommonMark count? https://spec.commonmark.org/

No, that spec is the failed attempt to standardize by Atwood et al., that Gruber sabotaged.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#334

Post by Timwi »

duskwuff wrote: post #299
eastbound wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not only that but Markdown use the conventions people already used in text files So why not Markup? At the time, everyone was using markup because Wikipedia was in wikimarkUP, with # for numbered lists, {} for macros and === to denominate titles. The latter still works in Markdown, but the former doesn’t. Funny heritage: Confluence shortcuts are also expressed in markup because it was the trend at the time, but the…

MediaWiki syntax was its own odd duck. It used '''bold''' and ''italics'', and [ https://example.com/ external links like this] - almost nothing else followed their lead.

And for a long time MediaWiki didn't have a proper parser for that markup, just a bunch of regexes that would transform it into HTML. I don't know if they have a proper parser now, but for reasons of backwards compatibility it must be lenient/forgiving, which means that converting all of Wikipedia to markdown is basically impossible now. So MediaWiki markup will stay with us for as long as there are MediaWiki wikis.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#335

Post by dpe82 »

inopinatus wrote: post #225
cdmckay wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could still support a subset of the most common features like bold, italic, strike, bullets, links, etc. Isn’t the beauty of MD supposed to be that if you can’t render it it should still look fine as plaintext?

The problem for web browsers is that markdown is technically a superset of HTML.

In what ways is it a superset? What can you express in markdown that can't be expressed in HTML?

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#336

Post by duskwuff »

Timwi wrote: post #334
duskwuff wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MediaWiki syntax was its own odd duck. It used '''bold''' and ''italics'', and [ https://example.com/ external links like this] - almost nothing else followed their lead.

And for a long time MediaWiki didn't have a proper parser for that markup, just a bunch of regexes that would transform it into HTML. I don't know if they have a proper parser now, but for reasons of backwards compatibility it must be lenient/forgiving, which means that converting all of Wikipedia to markdown is basically impossible now. So MediaWiki markup will stay with us for as long as there are MediaWiki wikis.

There's been some progress on that front:

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

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#337

Post by yencabulator »

mlok wrote: post #90
NelsonMinar wrote: post #52

I think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.) I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of…

A more intuitive norm, used in other formats, would have been : *bold* /italics/ _underline_

Lots of geeks regularly talk about storing configuration files under /etc/.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#338

Post by yencabulator »

xigoi wrote: post #205
cdmckay wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could still support a subset of the most common features like bold, italic, strike, bullets, links, etc. Isn’t the beauty of MD supposed to be that if you can’t render it it should still look fine as plaintext?

Even these basics are not consistent. See my Markdown Monster: https://git.sr.ht/~xigoi/markdown-monster/blob/master/monste...

There should be only one correct interpretation of that according to CommonMark. Software is faulty for sure and a lot of the these "markdown converters" are pre-AI slop code but at least there is a carefully written spec now.

(That dude who coined the name Markdown is being a dick about other people finishing his abandoned idea is another issue and not the fault of CommonMark.)

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#339

Post by yencabulator »

inopinatus wrote: post #225
cdmckay wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could still support a subset of the most common features like bold, italic, strike, bullets, links, etc. Isn’t the beauty of MD supposed to be that if you can’t render it it should still look fine as plaintext?

The problem for web browsers is that markdown is technically a superset of HTML.

I think you mean that any markdown byte sequence will also parse with some results using an HTML5 parser?

Content-Type should fix that.

Easy enough to associate *.md with one on most static servers too.

Re: How Markdown took over the world

#340

Post by yencabulator »

chrismorgan wrote: post #179
anildash wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a file when it's loaded. (Maybe a "display as HTML" button or the like would be required before it would be rendered.)

“Markdown” is a family of writing formats. There is no one “Markdown”. It’s completely unsuitable for direct inclusion in the web platform. Related reading: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7763.html text/markdown registration.

You have to be willingly ignoring CommonMark, these days.

I understand it doesn't have all the extensions one might hope, but to not parse the basics like the examples in the spec say is just doing everyone a disservice.

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