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The Curse of Markdown

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Re: The Curse of Markdown

#81

Post by marxisttemp »

latexr wrote: post #56
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…

I listen to a few podcasts that Gruber is a friend of, but he’s always struck me as a bit vapid and haughty. He always seems to reference his own influence, which he seems to have earned by…coming up with a handful of basic text markup syntax and writing Apple hagiographies?

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#82

Post by agnishom »

bee_rider wrote: post #42

> 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…

That made me chuckle. It is like showing how good my programming language by building an interpreter.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#83

Post by jmull »

> Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web

The problem is made-up, too, based on the author’s (incorrect) perception of markdown.

You can start dropping in as much or as little HTML as you want.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#84

Post by usr1106 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #77

Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown . There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. The…

Everyone and that even includes many software developers uses unprofessional tools. Wysiwyg and pressing buttons are easier when you start. Text-only sources and mark up (like Markdown...) are more powerful when requirements grow.

Just as an example: We use Google's office suite in our company because there are some users who believe it is more user-friendly than storing text and a proper version control. For version control Google offers named versions. Last week some Google sheet reached its 16th version. Well, would have reached, if Google did not limit the number of named versions to 15. You cannot run a business with serious audit trail requirements using so-called user-friendly "everyone uses" tools. Everyone has horrible standards and inappropriate IT continues to lower them. It's a fact, but not a fact anyone should praise.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#85

Post by rr808 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #77

Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown . There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. The…

I think this is because normal people dont use git and/or console text editors. Its a powerful combination that makes markdown useful.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#86

Post by lmm »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #77

Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown . There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. The…

> It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format.

> They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold.

They do not. No normal person has ever said how happy they were that they could highlight text and click a button, and certainly not that they typed Ctrl+B. Normal people do not type Ctrl+anything.

Normal people don't type text at all, but if you find the most normie internet forum you can think of - one where people talk about car parts or who the Khardasians are dating or something - you'll find it has some kind of text markup format, and the most prolific users of that forum use the markup format rather than the WYSIWTF editor that craps up their formatting too much. And if you ever find a topic with two competing norie fora, you'll find the people on the one whose text markup format is more markdown-like will be happier than the people on the one whose text markup format is less markdown-like.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#88

Post by josephg »

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…

So? I could write my blog post in raw HTML without using any markdown at all. But we don't, because raw HTML is a bad tool for composing rich content.

The kind of things I want to be able to do (that markdown makes hard):

- Make a standard component for embedded images, which supports clicking the image to see it full-screen.

- Make "boxes", showing certain kinds of content. This is useful for diagrams, commentary, code, formulas, and more depending on what you're doing.

- Run code when building the page which can load external data and display it however I want. For example, I wrote a paper using typst recently. I have some data in a JSON file. My typst paper contains code to read in the JSON file and embed some of the values into a table in the output.

- Embed raw SVGs into the output, in an svg tag.

- Have programmatic content - eg, onclick handlers, hover states, etc.

- Make a table of contents (I think GFM supports this, but I don't think its a standard markdown feature)

- Have generated section titles (Eg "3.a Benchmark results")

- Make a webpage which contains content from a lot of markdown files in a folder. Each of those files may need custom ... well, everything.

- Use custom CSS styles. Styles might be local (just this element) or global across the page.

- Use extensions / plugins for things like programmatic diagrams

Raw HTML is a complete non-answer to this stuff. Its the sort of answer that makes me question if you've done any serious writing at all. Like, your comment reads to me as the writing equivalent of arguing that C is the best programming language because - if you need anything thats not in C, you can write it in assembly.

What I really want is some combination of markdown + react. Typst is close - or, it will be close once it supports HTML output. But markdown simply isn't powerful enough for serious writing.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#89

Post by agnishom »

I am not sure Markdown is a curse because of the gap that it creates in the chart. But I agree with one thing: we do need to explore interesting DSLs for producing beautiful documents.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#90

Post by fragmede »

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?

because, it is really awkward

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