I'd feel a lot better about Markdown if it had an actual spec apart from a pile of perl regexes and a maintainer that hadn't abandoned it. I still use it because it's the lowest-common-denominator, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.
The Markdown Mindset
41–50 of 52 posts
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#42Anybody use textile here?
Only in Basecamp, where I wish I could use Markdown.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#43i'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
I ended up writing a Markdown plugin to a client-side WYSIWYG editor. I needed the ability to store formatted text in MS SQL without either uploaded a binary blob (.doc/.pdf) or using a WYSIWYG with HTML output. Markdown is exactly what we needed but there weren't any good JS WYSIWYG editors available, so I hacked one together.
yep, same requirement here...
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#44I'd feel a lot better about Markdown if it had an actual spec apart from a pile of perl regexes and a maintainer that hadn't abandoned it. I still use it because it's the lowest-common-denominator, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.
I disagree. I was one of the “six active users” of Infogami before it was shuttered, so perhaps I have a unique perspective…
If Markdown were just a single language, then sure, it’d be nice to have a more precise specification, and a cleaner Word-of-God implementation. But with all the slightly different implementations that now exist, Markdown has become less a language and more a language family. It’s just not useful to talk about standardisation, because it isn’t possible now, and we can’t go back to 2005 when it might’ve been.
Besides, the Daring Fireball implementation is hairy only because it’s designed to “just work”. The handling of “special” cases is the very thing that made the original Markdown so user-friendly and tolerant to variation. That is what Markdown is all about, and why it has become so popular in the first place.
More than a language, it’s a culture—a culture of getting things done without worrying about all the details of formatting. And that, I think, is the point of the article.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#45I'd feel a lot better about Markdown if it had an actual spec apart from a pile of perl regexes and a maintainer that hadn't abandoned it. I still use it because it's the lowest-common-denominator, but I have a hard time feeling good about it.
I disagree. I was one of the “six active users” of Infogami before it was shuttered, so perhaps I have a unique perspective… If Markdown were just a single language, then sure, it’d be nice to have a more precise specification, and a cleaner Word-of-God implementation. But with all the slightly different implementations that now exist, Markdown has become less a language and more a language family. It’s just not usef…
I agree with you. Markdown is meant to be very straightforward and simple, especially since it can be augmented with HTML. MultiMarkdown[1] and GFM[2] exist as variants of Markdown that can do much more, for those who want more... and I'm sure there are other flavors.
[1]http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/ [2]http://github.github.com/github-flavored-markdown/
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#46I totally agree. I just converted my blog to Markdown and Jekyll to be published on GitHub pages. It's awesome to be able to edit blogs in a programmers' editor with all its power and features, integrate code snippets and just push my changes when done.
While much of this was possible before, Markdown is so much easier for writing a programming/tech blog.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#47If 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/
Many thanks for the link to pandoc. This is incredibly helpful.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#48If 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/
All my notes, like this one:
http://notes.ceondo.com/mongrel2-zmq-paas/
are both available as HTML and PDF thanks to Pandoc. I really really recommend it. It is robust and extremely fast.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#49Thanks for the article: useful. Until recently almost all of my writing has been plain text (really plain text, and plain text with bits of Latex for documentation and writing books).
I have reverted recently to using RTF a lot for writing work notes, not feeling great about it, but there is a real convenience factor because OS X plays nicely with RTF for Finder instant view and using TextEdit. The bulk of my day to day (non-programming) writing is simply writing out copious daily work notes documenting everything that I do for my customers. I have found that being able to lightly style especially important notes is a large enough advantage to forgo the simplicity of plain text. Also, RTF pastes well into GMail if I want to send a styled text email (which I seldom do).
Based on reading this article, I may try the experiment of keeping my work notes for a single customer in plain text + markdown. The Marked OS X app looks pretty nice, but I am concerned that having two windows open (for editing and for viewing) might slow down what is now a very low ceremony activity.
Re: The Markdown Mindset
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
My favorite thing about Pandoc is its LaTeX transparency. You can just throw some TeX in there and it will pass it through. Of course doing this bypasses the possibility of easily converting to HTML, but I've started many research papers writing in Markdown, which has less, let's say, "markup overhead" than LaTeX, previewing the results using pandoc's markdown2pdf utility. Then later when I'm ready to use the proper…
With a little script? Have you seen the recent pandoc+beamer integration?
Hadn't seen that, thanks!