The Curse of Markdown • Hacker News Board

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#41

Post by seanhunter » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 6:56 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #13

seanhunter wrote: post #9

There's a special circle of hell for places who make "plot-like" illustrations that are supposed to look like data visualisations but are just graphics. It's extremely deceptive. TFA has a bunch of things which look like plots of richness vs cost but are actually just what a statistician would call "totally made-up bullshit"

"There is a relation, and it should look like this" is a very common way for people to express themselves. Your way would ban all the engineerings and most of physics from being created.

What you're talking about is a sketch, which is totally fine. What this website produces is a thing that is very clearly a facsimile of a plot. It literally has made an attempt to produce points of different sizes etc, to look like a bubble plot but it's not. It's just made up.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#42

Post by bee_rider » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 6:57 PM UTC

> A great example of a rich content website is the Tailwind CSS landing page.

This is a pretty bad example, right? It is the landing page for some web framework or whatever, that shows you it can make over-complicated websites by being itself an over-complicated website. It is being good at its job in some sense no matter what it does, because the thing it is showing is… the thing that it does.

But, this doesn’t show any evidence that any other websites need to be as interactive and dynamic as the tailwind website (they don’t).

Websites are all over-complicated, markdown is no curse. If this wall is true, it is a blessed line of defense.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#43

Post by flkiwi » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

> Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them.

The premise is deeply flawed. Richness is not a sign of care or investment in the reader's experience. Often it's exactly the opposite. Often richness is gaudy and pointless while simplicity makes content clearer and more useful. Maybe this is a great and valuable tool for certain use cases, but the justification here is weak.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#44

Post by JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #5

This format—with each paragraph fading as you scroll, and large changing images alongside—is borderline unreadable. Somewhat ironic in a blog post that (I think) is about tradeoffs between text and formatting.

Also:

> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them

Ironic when only the first paragraph is shown when JS is disabled.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#45

Post by bluGill » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:03 PM UTC

jmartinez27 wrote: post #2

Non-related, but this is the first time I actually like animations that happen while scrolling. I think it has something to do with the fact that I still have control over the scroll on the right.

I'd much rather see each individual graph as a picture so I can compare.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#46

Post by bluGill » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

djoldman wrote: post #31

> This jump in cost disrupts the trade-off between richness and effort. For content with a sweet spot just beyond Markdown’s limits, the additional effort often seems too high for the small gain in richness, leading to a preference for staying with Markdown and sacrificing richness. Why is asciidoc not more popular? It seems to support more than markdown and seems straightforward.

asciidoc, restructured text, and there are several others tools that support some more features.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#47

Post by liendolucas » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

Meh. An overengineered article about markdown. I stopped reading after: "Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web".

MD is a tool, just as any other tool after becoming familiar with it, you know in advance if it's going to serve you well or not and of its potential limitations.

I keep all valuable personal notes on a local Hugo which is basically all markdown and I wouldn't have this if I had to write things down myself in any other format. So no, is not a curse at all but a timer saver for me it is.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#48

Post by bluGill » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:07 PM UTC

sharkjacobs wrote: post #34

What's an example of a website or feature which needs just a little bit more "richness" than a static website with formatted text and links and images?

Any page that needs a table of contents with links to the sections.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#49

Post by cdchn » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

kccqzy wrote: post #16

Markdown has always supported direct raw HTML in it. I don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost. Don't be a Markdown purist. Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML. He doesn't even do multi-paragraph ordered lists in Markdown, and chooses to write instead. And he also uses for clickable ima…

At that point, why aren't you just writing HTML?

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#50

Post by jfax » Tue, Dec 03, 2024, 7:13 PM UTC

The first example website given here is described "just text with minimal styling." It's not just text though, it's hypertext? Since when did everyone lose sight of what hypertext is.