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Thoughts on Markdown

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Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#61

Post by gerikson »

simias wrote: post #56
unfocussed_mike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We've had a variety of markup formats including HTML, XML, etc. which are relatively a pain to read or write. Right, but Markdown relies on HTML (or whatever other markup it is pre-procesing) for anything difficult. I like Markdown[0] but surely our job as technologists is to find better solutions than a system that requires you to escape asterisks in certain situations, or rely on a preview pane to work out what i…

I would argue that it may be a case of "less is more". Yes Markdown is limited, but the limits make the language trivial to learn, modify and understand. It also means that the format can be trivially displayed almost anywhere and converted to all sorts of other formats. There will always be a tradeoff between simplicity and the feature set, I find that for the vast majority of my use cases Markdown is simply good en…

Check out Gemini, its format is even more limited than Markdown, and it's TLS-native unlike Gopher.

Gopher might have won if students had ~/public_gopher directories, but it was not to be...

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#62

Post by gerikson »

fanf2 wrote: post #38
jillesvangurp wrote: post #33

Markdown is merely the lowest common denominator of what is essentially a jungle of weird and wonderful wiki languages. The reason it is so under-specified is that it emerged out of the Ruby community in a time where the whole point of Ruby was that it was a scripting language without a lot of appreciation for things like types or specifications. The first serious attempts to unit test and specify ruby itself actuall…

John Gruber’s original markdown processor was written in Perl, not Ruby.

I still use it on my blog (as a filter).

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#63

Post by unfocussed_mike »

gerikson wrote: post #61
simias wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that it may be a case of "less is more". Yes Markdown is limited, but the limits make the language trivial to learn, modify and understand. It also means that the format can be trivially displayed almost anywhere and converted to all sorts of other formats. There will always be a tradeoff between simplicity and the feature set, I find that for the vast majority of my use cases Markdown is simply good en…

Check out Gemini, its format is even more limited than Markdown, and it's TLS-native unlike Gopher. Gopher might have won if students had ~/public_gopher directories, but it was not to be...

Gopher would not and could not have won, for two very good reasons:

(Would not) -- it was more complex to implement, being stateful (and it lacked the markup flexibility of HTML, which was kind of a big draw)

(Could not) -- the University of Minnesota announced their intention to collect licensing fees on their Gopher server (and client, I think), which was invented there.

This was a key moment in the web's development, because as a response CERN disclaimed ownership of web technologies -- under some pressure from IBM, as I recall, and IBM threw their research weight behind HTML/HTTP[0]

And that was that, basically. All happened in a few weeks in 1993.

(I can't find you a link to a discussion of IBM's action, but I can describe in detail the flashback to a freezing-cold, excesively-air-conditioned Sun SLC workstation lab at the University of Reading where I first read about it)

People crushing on Gopher these days do make me smile. Sure, it's like vinyl records.

[0] though this is hazy, I think they also made a promise not to assert relevant patents they held

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#64

Post by slightwinder »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

> It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that.

It used established syntax, but it didn't start there. There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times. A language is not just some random parts.

> You could print out a Markdown document today and jump in a time machine to 1970 and hand it to someone and they'd understand it.

Because it's human-friendly by design, not because it's syntax already existed back then. There are limits to what people would understand in 1970 from the syntax.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#65

Post by BiteCode_dev »

masklinn wrote: post #46
dmje wrote: post #8

I've said it so many times my throat is sore but here goes again... As with literally everything, it depends. Markdown is lovely for tech documentation, notes and journaling. It's simple and beautiful and mostly independent of layout. Want to author something rich and expressive which has a modern web audience in front of it (either end user or editor) and it's probably not the right tool. I work with large numbers o…

> Markdown is lovely for tech documentation That’s one of the weakest points of Markdown, because it has no support for any sort of cross-referencing so they have to be maintained by hand or through bespoke extension (often conflicting).

MySt and sphinx are getting attentions these days. As a ascii doc lurker, and fed up of rst, I'm very hopeful.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#66

Post by gerikson »

ihateolives wrote: post #49
open-source-ux wrote: post #5

I agree with a lot in this article. I too have seen 'non-technical' users struggle with Markdown. The popularity of Markdown among developers also reminds me about SSGs (Static Site Generators). Two technologies loved by developers - and no-one else. " For limited use cases, like blog posts of simple rich text with images and links, markdown will get the job done. " I'd argue it's even less suitable than that. Develo…

> Developers never look beyond Markdown when writing documentation or articles and are thus blissly unaware of the much richer writing possibilties of using HTML (which is simple to learn, unlike CSS). HTML is wolf in sheep's clothing though. It's deceptively simple to learn the basics, but the nested nature of it is something that will allow one to shoot their semantical or representational foot off, even before try…

XHTML was quietly led behind the shed and shot a decade ago.

I bumped into a site with that cute little XHTML approved logo, and checked if it verified. Of course it didn't.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#67

Post by bluenose69 »

periheli0n wrote: post #58
bluenose69 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`? After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal become…

> On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not. Do you know if they used LaTeX for the layout internally, or if they used some proprietary system that was fed the LaTeX source?

I think they used LaTeX internally, but I've no way to be sure. They provide latex style sheets and sample files, and so those were my starting point. Of course, they are a big organization, and latex is a simple system, so they might have a program that translates it to something else, e.g. using latex to create PDFs and something else for other formats. But at least at the galley-approval stage, it was still LaTeX.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#68

Post by SkeuomorphicBee »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

Exactly, Markdown is a great example of the "pave the desire path" philosophy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#69

Post by akavel »

slightwinder wrote: post #64
Falkon1313 wrote: post #36

>That’s almost 20 years ago — yikes! What started as a more writer- and reader-friendly syntax for HTML The author appears to have some recency bias that misses the point of Markdown. It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. You could print out a Markdown document today and jump…

> It didn't start when it was named and mapped to HTML. It was in use on usenet and in emails before HTML even existed. And most of its conventions came from typewriters before that. It used established syntax, but it didn't start there. There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times. A language is not just some random parts. > You could print out a Markdown document toda…

> There are also other markup-languages, which use other established syntax from the old times.

Would you care to share some examples? I'm genuinely interested, while nothing obvious that would fit this description comes to my mind.

Re: Thoughts on Markdown

#70

Post by wakeupcall »

fjorde wrote: post #31
wakeupcall wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share the same opinion. Its limit make it useful only for a very small set of use cases. It's being used a lot for code documentation, but MD is bad fit for documentation. Good documentation requires a lot more formatting and cross-referencing than you'd think. Every language I'm using that has been using MD (for embedded and online docs) added extensions, resulting in more fragmentation. So in general I switch bet…

I agree with both these points. Inter-document references are bad in markdown and wiki style formats. Wikipedia is replete with overlapping and contradictory information that should be pulled from a single source. Do you have any ideas re link-rot, or underlying assets changing and semantic links becoming invalid? How do you reference a code asset whose name could change, what will not only replace all references in…

Cross-reference checking is a huge problem on it's own, almost unrelated to the formatting being used. Some language tooling do provide cross-ref checking, generally as an extra step part of the documentation generation process. I don't have anything to add to the table compared to what we do already...
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