It seems sort of odd to have an “export to markdown” command. Markdown is nice… because it is sort of like a normal markup language, but easier to write, right? But exporting is specifically the one case where markdown’s strength doesn’t matter. The computer can type, like, real fast and can output verbose and niche syntax easily.
Why not export to the best format, LaTeX? I don’t think anyone could argue that Markdown is better than LaTeX as long as you don’t actually have to write it.
As its author, he’s right though. There really shouldn’t be a standard considered Standard Markdown. It muddies the fact that it wasn’t published by its author. Maybe Common Markdown would have been a better name between a few large orgs.
It was briefly renamed Common Markdown as well, and John hated on that as well, so it became CommonMark. And now we're in an odd position where Github and friends all validate their implementations against the CommonMark suites, but refer to the result as "Markdown" to their users, which makes the work they're doing maintaining that stuff especially thankless.
And then there is GFM (Github Flavoured Markdown), which is a bit different from Common Mark.
Isn't it a bit early to have thoughts about something we don't know the UI/UX of? Could be that "Markdown support" is just "Import/Export as Markdown", or even just export. Or it could be a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor. The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10% of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation that doe…
I’m surprised to see a DF article here. I thought he was black listed
There is a whole pile of dang comments about this brouhaha, he wasn't 'blacklisted', that's just something Gruber imagined because his articles don't do all that well on HN these days. People become less popular without HNs help.
It makes sense that Markdown is a good tool for a specific purpose, and generalized note taking isn't it. As an aside, I have a dream that Apple Notes could be piped into a website as a form of blogging. As it is, I haven't found a way to do it...
I take my notes in INI format with a lose schema, as I accumulate data I tend to move towards something more concrete and write tools for it. I think this is the absolute best compromise between some kind of formal personal ERP-like (PRP?) system and something super loose like Markdown or org mode.
Of course doing this on an iPhone is an absolute nightmare because everything has to be blessed by Apple and you can't just do one-off ad-hoc automations or usefully compose tooling that touches the filesystem. Everything has to be canned and sharecropped (at best) so them adding Markdown to the only text editor that supports fast, energy efficient background sync is a huge deal.
When I had an iPhone I did try doing some server-side automation with the SGML-like (can't remember if it was actual HTML or not) format notes used. Like most of those sorts of things it was a miserable uphill fight to get value out of the thing. I've been so happy ever since I've completely given up on anything smartphone related.
Isn't it a bit early to have thoughts about something we don't know the UI/UX of? Could be that "Markdown support" is just "Import/Export as Markdown", or even just export. Or it could be a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor. The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10% of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation that doe…
Notes is already a WYSIWYG editor, with a feature-set exceeding that of plain Markdown (handwritten notes, math formulas and plots, colored highlighting, etc.). In the general case, Markdown export and re-import would likely be lossy, or would have to use HTML elements for non-Markdown features. The main question IMO is if they’ll add Markdown source visualization and source editing, in addition to export/import. It could conceivably even just be export, without import.
Isn't it a bit early to have thoughts about something we don't know the UI/UX of? Could be that "Markdown support" is just "Import/Export as Markdown", or even just export. Or it could be a fully fledged WYSIWYG editor. The rumors seem to indicate just "Export as Markdown", which seems to be exactly what Gruber wants, according to the last 10% of the blogpost. So the rest is ranting against an implementation that doe…
Gruber is famously protective of the original Markdown specification and his specific use case. He’s reacting to others’ expectations and clarifying his position that a “Markdown editor” is a bit of an oxymoron. He supports that position by reiterating his inspiration for creating the format.
I’m constantly sending URLs to people, like https://somesite.com/login. The point of these links is usually that people read them and understand them.
But the automatic behavior is to replace the text with OpenGraph links, big obnoxious bubbles of graphics, which distort or destroy the meaning that I’m trying to convey.
Given the opportunity, I would send most links wrapped in `backticks`.
It's also great for writing documentation in a plaintext IDE, which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption.
> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself. Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to w…
Don't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.