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The Curse of Markdown

codehike.org

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Re: The Curse of Markdown

#51

Post by tristor »

This entire argument is weird. My website is relatively rich in content, in different contexts, including (now out of date/deprecated) interactive tutorials. Every single thing on my website is statically generated from Markdown.

Nothing about richness or leanness is implied or enforced by using Markdown for text, it's about everything else around it. On a statically generated page, you do it in Javascript, and render client-side if needed w/ data prepopulated in static objects. The only thing you can't do with a static page that ingests text as RST or Markdown or any other markup language, is something that requires dynamism with a backend database.

This is trying to blame Markdown and statically generated sites for leanness, but minimalism is a stylistic aesthetic choice people made that was a trend for awhile, it's not a requirement of the technology. The technology is just a tool.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#52

Post by dannyobrien »

cdchn wrote: post #49
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?

Markdown is really just a way of making the average, text, bit of HTML a little bit easier to read and write. Even when you're including some HTML in it, it still has that advantage over raw HTML.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#53

Post by verdverm »

marcosdumay wrote: post #11
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.

Yes, this one doesn't hijack the scroll. It just reacts to it, by changing the text formatting. I still didn't like it. But it's undeniably much better than the usual way people animate their sites.

Having tried out CodeHike, there are a number of configurations or situations where you can get into scrolling and alignment issues

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#54

Post by lgessler »

Extended (or rather, distended) Markdown flavors always make me queasy, and I don't love the snippet from Code Hike. In my mind, Markdown is fundamentally intended to be lightweight--something for a Reddit post or a blog comment. Heavily extending its syntax instead of choosing a saner syntactic basis strikes me as ill-advised. But one can't deny the advantages for adoption to be had from using Markdown as a starting point, and the project appears to be very popular, so perhaps worse is better.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#55

Post by lgessler »

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.

I think GP is saying that just lines on the same plot would have been less deceptive, whereas the plot that is actually there has fake data points. Readers are used to the former being purely imaginative, whereas the latter almost always means there's real measurement involved.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#56

Post by latexr »

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…

> 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.

John Gruber is the worst possible authority to reference here. He’s a bad steward of the standard and Markdown is popular despite him, not because of him. His own implementation has bugs that will never be fixed, doesn’t support features we all take for granted as basic Markdown, and he refused to even acknowledge when someone wanted to make a proper standard out of it. If Markdown were left to him, none of us would be using it and would have come up with something inspired by it but probably better and without a myriad of competing implementations with different levels of support.

> Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML.

In situations where, if he used any parser other than his own stagnant code, the whole post could have been written in Markdown. For crying out loud, in the page you linked he has Markdown tables (which his parser does not support) inside HTML comments followed by HTML tables. Daring Fireball is a popular site, but it’s not an example of good design or content structuring. To this day it’s still annoying to read on mobile.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#58

Post by bvrmn »

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

IMHO article would be much better while not exploring new ideas and use simple text and web-native controls instead of inconvenient accessibility-wise poor UI/UX.

P.S. Print preview is hilariously bad.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#59

Post by aylmao »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #38
aylmao wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the note of embedding HTML in Markdown, I think it'd be cool if it were just as easy to embed Markdown in HTML. Something akin to a tag. Markdown makes it easy to write formatted content at the cost of initial compiler setup, HTML is 0-cost setup but takes some effort to write formatted content. With a tag one could start with vanilla HTML at zero cost, use all its features straight away, but not have to type HTML…

That sounds like a good idea, until you remember that there is no officially agreed upon markdown spec. For content authors it'd be both fantastic if browsers could just go "you guys go fight it out, we're just gonna go with GitHub flavored markdown" but at the same time for browser makers that's taking a position on something that they have no stake in. So writing or using someone else's custom element is pretty muc…

yeah, I wasn't hypothesizing this as something that should be added natively to browsers. Web is complicated enough officially supporting 3 languages (or 6, if you consider wasm, webgl and wgsl)

Though for what its worth, "no official agreed upon spec" didn't stop browsers before haha

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#60

Post by apitman »

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…

I wish more sites offered plain text versions. You can read mine with netcat:

nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feed

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