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The Curse of Markdown

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Re: The Curse of Markdown

#91

Post by fragmede »

lmm wrote: post #86
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 b…

forum? Instagram is the mainstream product you're looking for, and the text rendering there is decidedly GUI based and not markdown-esque

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#92

Post by josephg »

misthop wrote: post #10

> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive >That sparse area ju…

Eh, maybe that's excessive for you and the kind of writing you do. But I think the author is right - there's plenty of valuable writing where being able to customize the page more is valuable.

The most obvious example to me is academic articles - where you need footnotes, figures, algorithm blocks, appendicies, math, numbered sections, and so on. Markdown doesn't support any of that stuff and latex is horrible on the web. It would be great to have something with support for those features, but that also supported HTML output.

But, there's plenty more examples where being able to make richer content than markdown supports is super valuable. For example, Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog is incredible:

https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

Doing anything like this in markdown is hard. You're kind of fighting the tool. The ideal tool would support custom components + custom styling - which aren't supported at all by markdown.

This whole comment thread is weirdly down on the article. I suspect most people have simply never come up against markdown's limitations while doing technical writing. They're quite severe whenever the output of your documentation needs to be a rich website or paper, not just a documentation file in a github repository.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#93

Post by AceJohnny2 »

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 don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost.

Then you missed the core point of the article, so I'll try and rephrase it:

While you're staying in Markdown-only land (the left part of the article's graph halfway down the article: low-medium richness (horizontal), very low complexity (vertical)), you are not learning HTML.

You miss the "onboarding" process to the richness of HTML, so when you reach the limits of what Markdown can do, and suddenly you need something medium-rich... you have to play catch-up to learn all the HTML that you avoided by sticking to Markdown. That's the gap.

The fact that Markdown supports in-line HTML allows you to bridge the gap, but is irrelevant to the point.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#94

Post by scblock »

briandoll wrote: post #62
latexr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

100% this -- we tried to work with JG to create and support a Markdown standard when we formalized "GitHub flavored Markdown" and got the exact opposite reaction many of us expected. Even using the name in any context was seen as a slight. More context: https://github.blog/engineering/user-experience/a-formal-spe... https://github.github.com/gfm/

Dude created a simple tool based on email conventions of the time and released it to the world for free and it's still with us, used all over. And you're here crying that he didn't want to work with you? Did you think he was somehow obligated to? How incredibly entitled.

It's open source, so you do what you do. That's the good and bad of it. No one owes you a god damned thing.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#95

Post by scblock »

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…

Hi. I'm not a software engineer. I write a lot, and I use Markdown for most of it, including in professional context as a team manager. Even for things as simple as call notes (just a bullet list, but that's THE POINT).

This is a really stupid take.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#96

Post by gglitch »

josephg wrote: post #92
misthop wrote: post #10

> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive >That sparse area ju…

Eh, maybe that's excessive for you and the kind of writing you do. But I think the author is right - there's plenty of valuable writing where being able to customize the page more is valuable. The most obvious example to me is academic articles - where you need footnotes, figures, algorithm blocks, appendicies, math, numbered sections, and so on. Markdown doesn't support any of that stuff and latex is horrible on the…

Had the same thought. It’s not that you can’t get an index out of Pandoc, it’s that it’s a bridge just slightly too far unless you’re really committed, and then you have a long road ahead of you.

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#99

Post by the_af »

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…

Gruber also had a famously snotty reaction to Jeff Atwood (of coding horror, stackoverflow, Discourse and others) contacting him about standardizing markdown.

I won't rehash it here, it's been mentioned before both here and in Coding Horror (Atwood's blog)

Re: The Curse of Markdown

#100

Post by the_af »

marxisttemp wrote: post #81
latexr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I always wondered why anybody would "support" or subscribe to the microblog of someone whose profession seems to be "write about Apple, mostly defending them". And not in any detailed long form, either.
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