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Markdown is holding you back

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Re: Markdown is holding you back

#61

Post by hysan »

vorpalhex wrote: post #59
throwaway150 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them. That is well known and I am sure the author is aware of it. The problem they are describing is not whether HTML is technically allowed inside Markdown. It's that when you are writing Markdown, you are writing Markdown, not HTML, and that comes with some problems. > It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. In theory, yes.…

Most markdown engines allow short tags to stand in for html, so for frequent features you can just use a short tag. Alternatively you can extend markdown. I wrote a simple text based game engine that was markdown based but I needed some arbitrary additions appropriate for a game.. so I just added a few elements.

The author addresses this too. Once you start down this path, you go down the road of non-standardization which means losing portability, etc. I don’t see how this is a point against the author?

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#63

Post by twelvedogs »

I've never struck any off these problems, and in order to use the tools he suggests I'd have to switch out the systems I use that just support markdown

I sometimes make documents that require more complex formatting, so I use html after 20 minutes fucking around in word and getting angry

Tried and trusted process

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#64

Post by novemp »

> Your content isn't just for human readers. Machines use it too. Your content gets indexed by search engines, and parsed by LLMs, and those things parse the well-formed HTML your systems publish.

Sounds like I need to start using Markdown!

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#65

Post by hizanberg »

dschuessler wrote: post #10

You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this. So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't. [0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

I also put interactive components in my markdown docs, I’m only using Markdown for content now.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#66

Post by Quothling »

amitav1 wrote: post #37

I use Org-mode w/ GNU Emacs for all of my blogging(shameless plug: amitav.net). I like Org-mode because it's easy enough to write, looks nice enough, can be exported in quite a few formats, and the code block handling is chef's kiss . It supports quite a few languages and has a feature I've seen in no other editor before, where you can chain together code from different code blocks, and evaluate it, inside of the doc…

If org-mode wasn't so tied to emacs I suspect it would be the "default" text formatting syntax for a lot more people.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#67

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

tedggh wrote: post #58

Certainly not holding me back. I can go from crappy notes on a notepad to a polished and branded PDF release including TOC, tables, images and formulas, info/warning boxes, lists, code snippets with syntax highlighting, header/footer, etc in literally minutes. What else do you need?

Example: I want to explain the role of various files in the development directory. I start with a couple files; then I describe a command that creates a third file. And then I do this several more times, filling up the directory.

It wold be nice to show the starting list of files, a command, and the resulting list of files. It would also be nice to maybe color-code source and target files for each step, both in the command and in the listing. It may also help to typographically distinquish base files that are written by hand and generated ones. A few pictograms to tell apart files and directories would also be useful.

And it would be nice to somehow keep this a single process so that a command references a source state and produces the target state and the list of files is computed automatically.

(Doing this right now with XML and XSLT, targeting PDF via XSL-FO. Drew pictograms in SVG right in the XSLT. Haven't got to the automatic part yet, just got an idea that this is a natural way to go.)

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#68

Post by procaryote »

I use markdown because it's easy to read without rendering. All of the alternatives in the article seem worse

If I wanted more structure, I'd just write html; or mix html into the markdown.

Pandoc lets me do things like generate libreoffice or microsoft word documents from the markdown, using a reference document for styling of headings etc. This also gives me good enough control to generate OK looking pdfs. It's not LaTeX levels of control, but it's much easier

I don't want to do extra work to hypothetically make things easier for an LLM.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#69

Post by stonecharioteer »

I love RestructuredText. My blog used to be on RST, because I hate markdown. I moved to Hugo and Markdown because I wanted to put out content, not fight the weird system that was Sphinx (My RST blog was running on it), and ablog, the Sphinx blogging framework didn't work with Furo, my favourite theme. I just use Hugo, and I use Claude to fix the css.

Re: Markdown is holding you back

#70

Post by tasuki »

codybontecou wrote: post #20
dardeaup wrote: post #18

This is a timely topic for me. I'm just beginning the writing of a technical book. I plan to target epub/mobi. My research thus far has pointed to markdown -> html -> epub/mobi. If you were going to write a technical ebook would you use markdown or an alternative?

What about markdown do you feel limits you in your writing process? The beauty of markdown is that it’s standardized. If you find your self midway through the book and feel a need to change formats, it’s easy enough to parse and reformat.

> The beauty of markdown is that it’s standardized.

It isn't standardized. And that's the main problem.

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