Why are we still using Markdown?

https://bgslabs.org/blog/why-are-we-using-markdown/

by veqq • 4 months ago

233 309 4 months ago

bgslabs.org

andai• 4 months ago

Aaron needs to hurry up and reincarnate already.

jedberg• 4 months ago

Aaron had very little to do with Markdown, other than reviewing the spec once at the end.

otterley2• 4 months ago

Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough."

We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough!

Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the best compromise we know of today that provides just enough structure and typographic capability, while imposing very little cognitive load on the author.

Besides, if you need something more complicated these days, you can have your favorite AI agent do it.

wisemanwillhear• 4 months ago

The solution is sufficiently perfected with markdown. Just like new revolutionary technologies doesn't replace wheel technology.

SoftTalker3• 4 months ago

To actually manage notes and information in plain text I like org-mode markup. For just writing, markdown is good enough.

xigoi9• 4 months ago

For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages.

• I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic.

• I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists.

• I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.

chrisweekly2• 4 months ago

I suggest trying Obsidian for WYSIWYG markdown editing. It beats heck out of typing it raw and eliminates that cognitive load.

nxpnsv• 4 months ago

1&2 just pick one, it doesn’t matter. 3 mostly you’re the parser… if you’re after accuracy there are better versions, but it sure is simple to read and write

mh-• 4 months ago

compared to other markup languages

I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days.

What are you contrasting to?

As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.

recursivedoubts• 4 months ago

I came here to say this.

nostrademons2• 4 months ago

It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code.

It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.

reaperducer2• 4 months ago

markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media

For those of you who weren't there:

  *bold*

  _underline_

  ~strikethrough~

  /italics/

  > Quotation

  - list
  - list
  - list

I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.

singpolyma34• 4 months ago

Stepped right on the rake though because it uses sigils which were common, but requires they be used in uncommon ways (by doubling etc) which it why most chat UIs don't actually use markdown

je42• 4 months ago

Writing mark down linter, i am i nterested in - if you think that you requirements for markdown formatting could be encoded in (relatively) simple rules?

sph• 4 months ago

Worse is better doesn’t mean worst is best either.

AlotOfReading2• 4 months ago

Markdown is pretty far from the worst. It's decent and unobtrusive. Worst would be something like Troff or jira formatting. Midtier would be RST.

ZoomZoomZoom• 4 months ago

This is exactly why ReStructured Text is better/worse.

neonstatic3• 4 months ago

worse is better

It's a very old idea

  In the paper, Copernicus postulated the principle that "bad money drives out good", which later came to be referred to as Gresham's law after a later describer, Sir Thomas Gresham. This phenomenon had been noted earlier by Nicole Oresme, but Copernicus rediscovered it independently. Gresham's law is still known in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe as the Copernicus-Gresham Law.

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

edanm• 4 months ago

I'm not quite sure I understand the connection.

zelphirkalt2• 4 months ago

Saying, that it is the best compromise we know of is going a little far, I think. There are more readable intuitive formats, but they simply don't have the spread, that markdown formats have.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Why do you think that is?

throw0101c• 4 months ago

We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough!

What about something like AsciiDoc (or reStructuredText)?

* https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

* "Markdown, Asciidoc, or reStructuredText – a tale of docs-as-code": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33468213

Simply things are still simple, but there seem to be more advanced options for those that want/need them.

Analemma_• 4 months ago

The problem is that proposed Markdown alternatives are targeting a vanishingly small niche of scenarios: for almost all simple writing Markdown is good enough, and for anything too complicated for Markdown, people will use HTML or LaTeX/Typst. The in-betweens just don't seem to have a reason to exist.

heresie-dabord• 4 months ago

barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough!

Writing is a demanding kind of encoding. At the same time, we all expect but rarely get good, accessible, searchable documentation. Why? The one barrier that cannot be removed is the need to retain semantic structure.

In TFA, the author writes:

    The Bad -- We don’t know what we want.

It's exactly this. We fail to recognise why we write and then we fail to express it. We don't write technical documentation for the equivalent of KLOCs. Writing something useful and meaningful -- not just performative filler for KPIs or SEO enshittification -- requires structure. Anything valuable that can't be retrieved effectively is lost. Imagine losing actual code or database rows at the same rate.

We consistently fail to manage meaning. It's strikingly paradoxical because the art of programming is all about meaning. We organise code semantically because it is essential to do so (not just for compiling, but also) for extending/refactoring/review/retrieval/understanding.

We need to write with the same considerations. This need not be complicated. Yet we persist in using the wrong utensils for the recipe.

Markdown is the best compromise we know of

It reduces keystrokes and makes the handraulic act of writing easier. But... it addresses only part of the problem.

As an example of a small improvement, HTML5 offers a minimal set of semantic tags: <summary> <article> <main> <section> <details> <aside> <figure> <figcaption> <time>

It may be a simplistic set of tags, but it is an improvement over easy-to-type text blobs.

duxup• 4 months ago

It's the inescapable truth that even after sitting down and engineering a magical solution ... sometimes just a basic CRUD function with just a couple bits added that doesn't have all the bells and whistles is what actually lasts when I write code and requires less maintenance.

There's the stuff that wows people and the stuff that people actually USE.

hulitu• 4 months ago

We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction.

What's wrong with .txt ?

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

We also want standard structure so the more than the content is understood.

fl4regun• 4 months ago

i use it because it does what i want and is easy to use.

sethherr• 4 months ago

This website, at least in dark mode, doesn't have any visible indication when text is selected.

... Which is additionally frustrating, since the links at the bottom aren't actually links (so you have to select them to copy and paste into your address bar)

oneeyedpigeon2• 4 months ago

I just cannot fathom the thinking behind presenting URLs but not linking to them. The author clearly knows something about all this (unless it's AI-written, but I don't think it is), so how have they made such a glaringly obvious mistake?

I'm half wondering if they're using a very strange CMS to publish this blog. The fact that they seemingly cannot use the correct double-quote character in their code blocks lends a bit of support to this theory.

dangus• 4 months ago

When I read articles like this my reaction is always “put up or shut up.”

If you have a better idea, make it happen.

The author merely described the parameters of a solution and didn’t even attempt to solve it.

In essence, we aren’t even left certain that a better solution that satisfies all stakeholders is possible.

causal• 4 months ago

These examples are contrived af.

Nobody uses markdown like that bro. We like markdown because it's easy to read both rendered and raw.

aerhardt• 4 months ago

Yea I’ve been typing encyclopedias worth of markdown, most to throw away, some to publish, and I’ve never had any the problems shown here.

andersco• 4 months ago

Because I think it’s fair to say it’s becoming a standard format for ai agent specs docs etc. It’s not going away anytime soon.

docheinestages• 4 months ago

I don't think Markdown should be (ab)used as a programming language. It should be treated as a plaintext container that has some formatting to organize the contents.

warkdarrior• 4 months ago

Agreed, if you need programmable content you can add some Javascript: https://www.markdownlang.com/advanced/javascript.html

kennywinker2• 4 months ago

Ambiguous means unclear meaning, not that there is more than one way to achieve the same thing.

Html has that same problem. Think <b>, <strong>, <p style=“font-weight: 900;”>, etc.

That’s life. Get used to it.

IshKebab• 4 months ago

<b> is now hilariously called the "bring attention to" element. I shit you not.

ceejayoz• 4 months ago

That's the sort of "we started at the acronym and worked backwards" approach the Pentagon loves to do.

tdeck• 4 months ago

Apparently <i> is the "idiomatic text element".

Maybe we can bring back all the fun tags by making them acronyms? <marquee> can be "make a really quite entertaining effect".

singpolyma34• 4 months ago

Those three are not the same thing though. They might render the same visually with the most popular visual user agents, but that's about it

kennywinker2• 4 months ago

Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck… but is semantically different, except for when most people interact with them.

My point wasn’t that they are identically - my point is that 99% of the time they achieve the same effect. Or they would be if I had swapped the <p> tag for a <span> tag.

BoredPositron3• 4 months ago

You can say hell on your own blog.

sophacles4• 4 months ago

Interestingly, you can also choose not to say it on your own blog.

BoredPositron3• 4 months ago

Why the heck would you use the phrase "Why the heck" in any circumstance other than to avoid censorship/algorithmic penality on a social media platform?

timokoesters• 4 months ago

Markdown has a lot of weird choices and works best for longer documents.

Check out my "Advent of Markdown" where I go through surprising markdown behavior: https://mastodon.social/@timokoesters/115643467322561173

sorrymate• 4 months ago

The article talks about how confusing Markdown can get. I understand, but HTML is *much* more confusing when it comes to creating technical articles. These days we are going to see more and more markdown with the advent of AI. Markdown works really we with AI because it reduces the number of tokens required for the same amount of information vs HTML.

mewpmewp2• 4 months ago

Yes fully agreed, markdown is going to win by far just because of tokens and AI. The only thing I think right now that should be advanced, is plugins/custom components for markdown, like .mdx, etc token efficient ways of visualizing things in various ways, or custom interactive components, etc.

stared• 4 months ago

Not many keystrokes to get a readable text. Yes, it has issues. But at its core, it is a plaintext with extra stuff, and no temptation to turn it into a webapp. (See my footnotes on HTML vs MD for saving text in https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/).

Yes, there is a problem with "many ways to do the same thing". The solution is ease - use a linter or autoformatter. No more bikeshedding.

If you plan to use a clean yet expandable syntax, look at Typst. One of its core design principles (https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#design-pri...) is:

Simplicity through Consistency: If you know how to do one thing in Typst, you should be able to transfer that knowledge to other things. If there are multiple ways to do the same thing, one of them should be at a different level of abstraction than the other. E.g. it's okay that = Introduction and #heading[Introduction] do the same thing because the former is just syntax sugar for the latter.

quelsolaar• 4 months ago

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.

zimpenfish• 4 months ago

Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good.

God, remember when that was that goal of HTML and the web?

What a beautiful couple of years that was.

singpolyma34• 4 months ago

IMHO still is. Just don't add any JS or CSS

Tadpole91812• 4 months ago

No? That has always been a uniquely unreadable language with weird, arbitrary choices.

And on no planet is it human readable without parsing.

xigoi9• 4 months ago

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good.

You know, like when you write <h2> in HTML or \section{} in LaTeX?

raincole• 4 months ago

These 2 produce IDENTICAL output.

...and? What a weird article. Of course two different pieces source code can produce identical output. Every single mainstream languages are like that too.

runjake• 4 months ago

Because Markdown is awesome, easier to write, and easier to read at the source level.

BeetleB3• 4 months ago

All problems are solved once you embrace org-mode.

All you need is Emacs! Nothing more!

sophacles4• 4 months ago

Objectively false. Please stop spreading misinformation.

BeetleB3• 4 months ago

I can think of a lot of potentially false things in the statement. The biggest falsehood likely is the perception that one needs Emacs. :-)

grumbel2• 4 months ago

One big thing I still miss with org-mode are explicit section endings. Just as with markdown you only have headings, the end of a section is implicit. This often leads to text getting swallowed up by the last chapter and makes any kind of restructuring fragile. HTML's <section> makes things much easier.

Having explicit header levels (similar to HTML's <h[0-6]>) is another annoyance, as that makes inclusion of one org document into another problematic and requires restructuring (somewhat workaroundable with "#+begin_src org").

BeetleB3• 4 months ago

as that makes inclusion of one org document into another problematic and requires restructuring (somewhat workaroundable with "#+begin_src org").

Outside of Emacs, yes. Within Emacs, there's a keybinding to paste a tree and have it fit.

fny• 4 months ago

Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines.

Almost everyone who complains has some parser or rendering related agenda. No one cares if you can't nest asterisks inside underscores. Most of these edge cases don't read well as Markdown, which defeats the purpose.

krapp6• 4 months ago

Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines.

We already had plain text for that. Markdown was invented to be converted to HTML. It has no utility over plain text otherwise. The link and image syntax is doing what HTML tags do, but are less readable for people than just pasting the URL. The relationship to the machine isn't incidental, it's intrinsic.

AlotOfReading2• 4 months ago

Markdown largely serves the same role as things like vocal emphasis and intonation in speech. Here are some example sentences that have slightly different semantics communicated by markdown differences.

My cat is an idiot.

My cat is an idiot.

My cat is an idiot.

Arainach5• 4 months ago

Somewhat related past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41120254

Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed:

To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?"

Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant.

Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax.

I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments.

*****

My thoughts on strictly-defined XML-ish syntaxes are the same: they're harder for humans to read, write, and modify, which defeats the primary purpose and benefit of Markdown.

Very few people have to write a Markdown parser. Many orders of magnitude more have to read and write Markdown. Optimize for them even if it makes writing the parser painful.

vbezhenar• 4 months ago

HTML is valid markdown. So I'm not sure how you make oppose markdown and XML. XML is basically a subset of markdown.

    <b>This</b> <i>is</i> *valid*
    <ul>
    <li>*Mark*</li>
    <li>_down_</li>
    </ul>

Markdown basically adds a whole layer of complexity upon HTML.

Arainach5• 4 months ago

If you're writing things like that in Markdown files (without being escaped in code blocks as HTML syntax examples), you're doing it wrong.

frizlab2• 4 months ago

There are other solutions which are as easy to read/write (if not more) and which are defined much better… Asciidoc comes to mind.

Arainach5• 4 months ago

"Better specified" doesn't mean better. A bunch of features doesn't mean better.

Markdown is popular because it is simple. I have never had to teach anyone Markdown. They look at the file and immediately see what's going on and can copy the style.

Occasionally someone may have to look up something like table syntax, but no one in my career or personal life has ever asked me to explain Markdown to them, which is rare for a technology that is so widely used.

This has not been my experience with other markup languages.

chrisweekly2• 4 months ago

Start with Obsidian (with "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode" as defaults) for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking. Then layer in plugins like Outliner, Templater, Canvas, Relay... and realize Obsidian is almost like an OS for .md files -- which are portable, and easily human- and machine-readable.

markus_zhang• 4 months ago

I actually do agree that HTML is a better one, if it is a bit easier to read the source...I want text, image and links in one place and HTML is indeed the easiest one.

BTW TempleOS terminal comes into mind. I really love the hyperlinks.

m-schuetz• 4 months ago

Easy and "good enough" very often trumps complex and comprehensive. Markdown is great precisely because it can't do a lot of things.

giamma• 4 months ago

Markdown is widely used but I agree that it's a mess, there are so many dialects..

A similar but better markup is ASCIIDOC; it's formally defined and comes with a Technology Compatiblity Kit (TCK) that can be used to certify the compliance of an implementation with the spec.

daft_pink• 4 months ago

Markdown is essentially plain text with a couple extra features. I think Markdown’s basic appeal is that it’s plain text.

qayxc• 4 months ago

That applies to XML, AsciiDoc, LaTex, ReStructuredText, and all the others as well. Apparent simplicity seems to be the most appealing factor, IMHO.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Readability as well.

asdfman123• 4 months ago

The article correctly identifies the upsides of Markdown, then identifies a bunch of issues that I, as a casual user of it, don't care about.

Then, in the solution section, doesn't identify a solution.

No thank you, I'll stick with Markdown.

iainmerrick• 4 months ago

I enjoyed how it complained about how unclear and ambiguous Markdown’s syntax for bold and italic text supposedly is, then showed an HTML translation with <strong> and <em>.

Diti2• 4 months ago

The solution is to use any other better-defined languages with a cheat sheet like [1].

If you’re used to CommonMark features, this is all you need.

[1] https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/asciidoc-vs-mar...

paranoidrobot• 4 months ago

I don't read HTML all the time, and I don't expect it to be easy to read when outside of a browser.

Markdown though, that's my slightly fancy readme. It has just enough structure that I can easily read and understand it on the command line.

I can easily grep it without need for an advanced parsing engine.

If you need something with font and style weight then go for HTML.

But if I see README.html with a project, it's going to put me off wanting to contribute. I do not want to learn that project's style guide for how to add some new parameters to a table or remember that they want to specify italics in one of a dozen different ways.

montroser• 4 months ago

That is a lot of complaining for having no suggested better alternative.

And there is your answer to the clickbait title -- we're still using markdown because there's no alternative that is so much better that it is going to dethrone the one that has all the momentum from being the first good-enough take on this that got any traction.

nharada• 4 months ago

I just can't find myself summoning the energy to be mad about markdown. It's good enough for like 99% of the things I use it for. Sometimes I get annoyed at specific extension support or whatever when I realize I shouldn't be using markdown for that task.

vessenes• 4 months ago

Hard, hard no on this.

Why are we using Markdown? Why do I use it every day?

It's easy to write. It's easy to read. Despite the OP's complaints, quality parsers exist.

pandoc can turn it into almost any format. We will still be writing markdown in 50 years, because the design bridges a bunch of compromises very nicely.

lopsotronic• 4 months ago

The "right element for the right meaning" crowd is always going to fall when they charge against the sheer walls of "but I like using Caution for my bulleted list" crowd. Or the "of course we put tire patches in the wiring element, it's when we use the tire patches".

Or a million other examples I've wrassled with over the literal decades.

Whatever sophisticated semantic scheme you move into the markup layer, is gonna get messed up. And then your fancy schema is just noise, very expensive noise. Markup layer needs to glue as closely to natural language constructs as possible, and then glue a little more closely than that, and let the bulk of the information derived come from natlang. It's boring, but it works, and it's easier than ever to get quantitative information out of natlang.

Keep the domain stuff out of the markup layer.

All that said, Asciidoc forever baby. Write actual books in it. Not really more complex than Markdown[1]. Beats up DITA, takes its lunch money. Win win win.

[1] Unless you go legit insane with `include` and `ifdef/ifndef/ifeval`

singpolyma34• 4 months ago

Funniest part of this article is claiming * will produce a b tag then demonstrating it will usually produce a strong tag and not even noticing this.

k__• 4 months ago

Because there's only one reasonable implementation of AsciiDoc

Diti2• 4 months ago

Is that an issue? There’s only one reasonable implementation of Typst too, and both AsciiDoc and Typst are fully supported by Pandoc, which supports a wide selection of writers (output formats).

heisenbit• 4 months ago

Markdown lacks JavaScript and can be considered mostly harmless.

alprado50• 4 months ago

Why would anyone dislike markdown when it is so simple to use? My only gripe with markdown is that sometimes i forget how to include links.

drob518• 4 months ago

On one hand, yes, all true, it’s definitely a bit of a mess. On the other hand, what’s the alternative and don’t all languages with limitations ultimately get extended by various parties in non-compliant ways? Can anyone point to any alternative that has done it all correctly? Show me one language where someone says “This is all good and correct” and I’ll show you a language with 100 feature requests to extend it way further than its original authors intended and would create a similar mess if acted on. This is all to say, I’m going to coin Roberts’ Rule which says “All markup languages eventually end up as piles of poo with half a Turing-complete language bolted onto the side. Resistance is futile.”

marssaxman• 4 months ago

I'm not using Markdown; I'm using plain text, along with a handful of well-understood formatting conventions which go back decades. "Markdown" is just a prettier means of displaying such text.

HTML is not a markup language anymore; it has become a lunatic application platform, and the last thing I want when trying to read some text is the intrusion of some lunatic's application.

kelnos• 4 months ago

I think the author is missing the point. Markdown is easy for humans to read, write, and modify. Yes, parsers can be complicated. Few people need to write parsers, so that's ok, if unfortunate for those parser authors. Orders of magnitude more people need to read, write, and modify the documents themselves, and the fact that it's easy to do so is a huge strength.

HTML is terrible when you consider these properties. It's not easy to read, and is annoying to write and modify. Ditto for any other XML-based markup language, or even something like RST. LaTeX is right out.

Ultimately the author seems to suggest plain text should be what people use? That misses the point. Plain text is great for a lot of things, but if you're going to generate HTML (or something else) from it, you need something that at least has some structure. Markdown hits a nice sweet spot where it has enough structure such that you can reasonably generate rich-text document formats from it, but not so much that non-technical users can't work their heads around the format.

bensyverson• 4 months ago

The answer to the question in the headline:

- It's pretty easy for humans to read & write

- It's very easy for AI to read & write

- It's quite token-efficient relative to its expressiveness

- It can be used in many different contexts, so it's actually surprisingly good for interchange.

There are many formats that are better-suited for a given purpose, but Markdown remains a very attractive compromise for many applications.

dasil003• 4 months ago

What was the Bjarne Stroustrup quote about two types of languages again? I certainly have gotten more mileage out of Markdown at this point in my long career as a programmer and web developer than I have out of hand-written HTML, XML, or other markup languages. The latter are good for automation and unambiguous representation needed for system building, but for the type of informal writing that is my bread and butter outside of coding, Markdown kills, and Obsidian is the killer app.

Glyptodon• 4 months ago

I think markdown has problems, but this doesn't really propose a sane solution.

The need markdown solves is document formatting without needing to know or use a tag-based markup language and remaining easily human readable and editable.

That said, this is actually not the most widespread requirement. And when people need to solve this requirement, there often not tons of options. So some flavor of markdown is often the least problematic option.

Brendinooo3• 4 months ago

When you look at wisdom principles, like those of the Solomonic kind, you observe that a proverb is profoundly true, wise, and useful when you first hear it, but it starts to feel less so when you subject it to intense scrutiny/deconstruction, or try to extrapolate it to places where it's not supposed to go.

Markdown is like that.

We use it because it's an incredibly human way of writing and reading data without having to wade too deeply into the various forms of overhead that allow machines to read, process, and display it.

krapp6• 4 months ago

People use Markdown because it's expected, it's probably already a part of whatever library or framework they're already using, and there is no well supported or popular alternative.

Brendinooo3• 4 months ago

I mean I started using it because I don't like using Word or Google Docs and wanted a more portable data format since I was going between Mac and Linux.

There are bunch of reasons why it came to dominate.

yawnxyz• 4 months ago

This sounds like all the arguments against using JSON/YAML as well.

People forget how important good UX can be, sometimes.

We're using Markdown, YAML, and JSON bc they're easy to use; they're "highly memetic" (easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to spread)

They don't require many months to learn like XML, back in the day

dbacar• 4 months ago

Markdown is for us humans. HTML is for machines.

Per keyboard stroke, you write much more content with MD than HTML.

Even without a specific browser/reader Markdown is relatively non-intrusive to read. You cant read HTML without an extra tool/effort to discard tags.

And you can parse MD with regular expressions, or can you? ;). (tip hat to infamous Stackoverflow discussion)

krapp6• 4 months ago

If HTML were for machines it would be a binary format. It's text so it's meant for humans to read and write, and humans did both for years without it being a problem.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Trained humans can read and write HTML. Untrained humans can read and then write Markdown.

jbritton2• 4 months ago

I strongly dislike flexible input like __Unambiguous___, *Unambiguous*

I’m reminded of the time Microsoft allowed mistakes in html writing. They attempted to parse a wide variety of common user errors. The effect of this was no standard and nobody else able to write a Microsoft compatible parser.

I dislike Nim lang because of this. At least Nim defined the specification. Still though I think it creates more cognitive load learning every legal variation and it makes searching more difficult.

I think to authors point if Markdown actually had a strict simple definition with one way to do it and no embedded html we would be better off.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Why does flexible input bother you? There’s more than one way to do it is more than motto, it’s how all human languages work. Or does speaking English really bother you?

jbritton2• 4 months ago

More complexity, no benefit. Human languages have lots of problems. I would simplify English if I knew how and had the power to make it so.

scoofy• 4 months ago

Anyone that thinks Markdown is bad is crazy. People need to be able to quickly and easily markup their text.

EPWN3D• 4 months ago

The only changes I'd want to Markdown:

- Reverse the link syntax braces, so the URL is in [], and the link text is in ()

- Allow table cell content to have line continuations

vondur• 4 months ago

There are other options. AsciiDoc come to mind.

__mharrison__2• 4 months ago

I've written over a dozen books.

Have used asciidoc, HTML, word, latex, and rst.

Markdown is the least painful of all. It's not perfect but the others are worse.

(My custom stack uses markdown (or Jupyter notebooks converted to markdown). Pandoc plus some custom filters creates typst (for PDF) or epub.)

acidburnNSA• 4 months ago

I did a book in rst and liked that it had cool admonition, import, glossary, and index features that made it better than markdown for me. Still hate the heading conventions.

__mharrison__2• 4 months ago

I have a custom pandoc filter for callouts and index entries. None of the simple lightweight markup languages has complete support for writing a real book. Writing custom rst code is a pain (and no one else in the world uses it). (I say this as a 25-year Python veteran and as a docutils committer!)

heliumtera• 4 months ago

You communicate on hacker news through plain text. You don't need to control the user don't, color, and what ads they see.

If what is to communicate, plain text is good enough. If you want to control how information is consumed, fuck of, die already.

jazz9k• 4 months ago

I love markdown for technical reporting when the alternative was a hacked together Word document.

ktimespi2• 4 months ago

I've thought about this a bit too, and instead of a straight escape hatch to html when any special formatting is necessary, it might make sense to bind css to particular elements like so:

##[color:red] Heading 2

or using code blocks with particular headers which render out as normal text with the styling applied, like this:

```styling: 'ruleset here...' Lorem Ipsum Dolor ```

this does require a lot of work to consider what might be ergonomic for a particular element (by element I mean ATX headings, blocks, etc.), though.

w10-1• 4 months ago

cf `# Heading 2 { attributes}` in pandoc:

https://pandoc.org/demo/example33/8.3-headings.html#extensio...

There are also attributes for image position/size, etc.

ktimespi2• 4 months ago

This is sweet!

jdefr89• 4 months ago

A few things here.

1. Use a proper Markdown parser. The grammar is easy to define EBNF style most implementations I see now days use some recursive descent parser, etc… Regex implementation was used in original authors parser when it became popular.

2. You can resolve ambiguities and define more consistent symbols that make sense. Most markdown implementations are decent and follow common sense best practice syntax.

3. The beauty is its simplicity. You can pick it up in a few minutes and utilize it anywhere you damn near see a text box.

4. Parsing to HTML isn’t the only option! I mostly use TUI markdown viewers that render the document via ANSI escape codes beautifully. Check out glow project. But once you parse and have a AST, you can easily walk it and render it in other ways as well. Again though. Everyone can read a text document and a html document. You can render it to a PDF if need be.

5. Do we really need a whole new markup text2<format of some kind>? Markdown is simple fast and widely supported. So I have to say.. I prefer it over most things and that includes Rst.

If you need real beauty and power you can move to LaTeX or something… My two cents anyway.

Yokohiii3• 4 months ago

I recently tried to create markdown like parser, I had to refer a lot to common marks. What I saw was madness. I never knew from casual use, that markdown is so complex. There is literally zero thought about parsing, it forces natural looking text into a format that can be structured into actual markup, but it has so many pitfalls and edge cases that it just feels wrong. Each time I've looked up another markdown parser I was stunned how overegineered they are. If you need an AST to parse something seemingly simple like markdown, then something went wrong. Probably every coreutil is smaller then the average markdown parser. Why?

bronlund2• 4 months ago

Because Markdown is made for humans, not for machines.

fg1372• 4 months ago

If you need an AST to parse something seemingly simple like markdown, then something went wrong.

This may surprise you, but that is very common in programming languages.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Because the size of the optional parser for Markdown is irrelevant to the purpose of Markdown.

drunkonvinyl• 4 months ago

i like html fine, but org-mode, now you're talkin'. it's like the nasa voyager equivalent of text markup. just needs to be rescued from being held hostage in emacs.

skydhash• 4 months ago

The format itself can be easily implemented. There's not much to it and it actually has features that's undefined in markdown like frontmatter and references. The things that are missing can be replicated outside of emacs (babel, agenda, task management, timetracking, export,...), it's just that no one is doing it.

Telaneo• 4 months ago

I like HTML and will use it for my own projects, but I cannot send pure HTML to someone who's not a into tech, so to speak, and expect them to actually read it. It doesn't take much CSS to make a readable web page, and I actually kind of like the barebones no-CSS HTML style, but for many others, that style reads as 'this page is broken'. I guess I can write all my styles inline or in the header, but that's a big ask when I never do that normally.

Markdown though, especially if you're not using way too much of it and mostly using it sensibly, just to give your document some structure, can be read as plain text by pretty much everyone, and will be implicitly understood. Sure, they might not understand the exact different between a word with asterisks on either side and one with underscores on either side, but they'll get that you meant to emphasise that work. They'll also understand a list shown with asterisks, while <ul> and <li> tags will get too verbose for them and clutter the actual content (I don't really care, but I get why they do).

neonstatic3• 4 months ago

This may be the first time my reaction to an objectively terrible programming language is a shrug and a "whatever". I like using markdown. I use it for journaling in Obsidian. It does everything I want it to. I like that it's just flat files. I don't want my journaling to be stuck in some online database.

Yet, I am the same person who refuses to code in anything but Rust due to how not-awful it feels to me. Strange how a person can hold a completely opposite view for two instances of the same problem. Being human in a nutshell.

nine_k4• 4 months ago

Markdown in an of itself isn’t powerful enough to satisfy the simple monkey brained developer like me who is only satisfied when the site looks good enough™.

Well, indeed, Markdown is an inadequate tool for that. Let the author use more powerful tools, be it HTML, LaTeX, SVG, etc.

Markdown is fine for its intended purpose: very light formatting, very simple header structure. If I were not that lazy, i would come up with something opposite to CommonMark, some MarkDownDown, that does away with alternative ways to format things, most escaping, and most advanced syntax. The goal would be to have an easy-to-implement, unambiguous, safe and simple subset good for use anywhere. Intentionally limited.

(For daily use I prefer Org Mode, due to its vastly superior support in my preferred editor.)

xigoi9• 4 months ago

If I were not that lazy, i would come up with something opposite to CommonMark, some MarkDownDown, that does away with alternative ways to format things, most escaping, and most advanced syntax.

https://djot.net/

bloppe• 4 months ago

If only you could just put html tags in the markdown whenever you need a bit of extra expressivity!

gloryjulio• 4 months ago

Exactly. I write my own notes in markdown, it works with or without a viewer app. I am not even sure if there is a better alternative. This format is good enough for most of the casual and semi serious use cases

MaulingMonkey• 4 months ago

I use a horrific mix of:

• Markdown (most of my notes these days, supplanting my previous use of plaintext.)

• Single-file HTML (when my use case for fancy documents exceeds markdown's limits. While you can embed HTML into markdown, renderers vary in what they allow or sanitize, and vary in how you can (ab)use style tags. I've even taken to looking up CSS rules for printed documents, since my intended target is often pdfs or actual print at that point. Occasionally, JavaScript!)

• Google docs (Android phone nonsense!)

I'd mutter something about "using the right tool for the right job", but that's probably giving myself too much credit.

pclowes2• 4 months ago

We use markdown because LLMs are great at it.

Markdown in the same directory as the code it documents is very readable by humans and LLMs.

Given LLMs proficiency in markdown and that reading it in view and edit mode is comparable I bet many engineering teams ditch confluence/Google docs for documentation in favor of just markdown plaintext docs adjacent to code (my team has moved design/RFCs to this as well, get feedback via PR commits, turn an LLM loose to implement design)

Also if you really don’t like it I bet you could just ask the LLM to translate it. No point wasting the human input characters or tokens on a ton of <></> etc

Ferret7446• 4 months ago

LLMs are great at it because it was already a widely adopted standard and fed to LLMs in training sets

pclowes2• 4 months ago

Exactly, I am very bearish about the prospects of any new languages post-LLM era gaining traction. Unless they are highly specialized or somehow better for LLMs.

notatoad• 4 months ago

i use markdown because it's inherently limited to styling that is easy to represent. it's a good way to communicate the limitations of text-based content submission form.

if you tell somebody they can use HTML, they get frustrated when you tell them that tags other than anchor, bold, italic, list, heading, and paragraph aren't supported. but if you tell somebody they can use markdown, then they implicitly understand that the content they're submitting won't be rendered as green text on a purple background, and don't try to accomplish that.

0xffff2• 4 months ago

This is just like the debate over YAML. In both cases, the language is simple enough, and people use it sanely enough in practice that I just don't care about the warts. Contrast this with something like C++, where the warts are less avoidable and therefore more worthy of notice. Markdown as I use it is functional and simple and no one has suggested an alternative I like better, so I keep using it.

Also, as I use it, Markdown is effectively plain text. I very rarely look at "rendered" markdown. I guess in practice I actually use "plain text" that just happens to look a lot like markdown by this article's definitions.

brookst• 4 months ago

Exactly this. At this point I read markdown as if it were rendered, with the exception of tables which are a mess visually in plain text.

But everything else, headings and bold and italics and lists, I’m honestly not sure I can tell the difference. It’s like watching movies with subtitles when you’re sufficiently experienced: your brain just fills in the gaps and you don’t even notice

Yokohiii3• 4 months ago

I don't know YAML well enough, I never liked it. But if you want to write an halfway common marks compliant parser, then markdown is just nuts. It is just way too complicated for the simplicity it conveys. Look at lists, they can be freely nested, and contain all(?) other block elements. That is extreme overkill. If you need that much flexibility, then any wannabe "simple" markup is just the wrong choice.

akvadrako• 4 months ago

YAML is actually very complex, to the point that basically nobody implements the full YAML 1.2 spec from 2009 (https://matrix.yaml.info/), while 1.1 contains footguns like `country: fr` and `country: no` parsing issues.

Though I agree simple usage is good enough in practice, there are a lot of edge cases that can cause subtle bugs.

sooc• 4 months ago

Markdown is _fine_? I certainly have my own issues with it; most of which can be mitigated by adhering to a style guide (e.g. only use one syntax for <em> and <strong> as well as <ul> and headers). I'm not sure why we need both asterisks and underscores to represent the __same semantics__ – to me this feels wasteful of precious ASCII. Perhaps it was to allow the writer to express their preference while providing a shared and consistent meaning (same with the other duplicate forms). In that sense it seems to have done an <del>excellent</del> okay job at affirming common ground. I'm not sure. From what I can tell, the original author has been reluctant to do the work here and has left this for others (i.e. CommonMark).

I do love writing in Markdown, but my reasons are adjacent in some ways. It's a flat file, the syntax is easy to on-board new users with, adoption is widespread, and the HTML escape hatch is available. I only adhere to the syntax because I can usually expect a parser to exist for whatever environment I'm in.

I don't think this is the best we can do (or have done). I find myself conflicted about where to go next. Gemtext is nice! Except, what I often want is more expressiveness and consistency. This will probably be, for me, a spec that can still be run through a "reasonable" Markdown parser. When the output breaks, it still comes out as readable plain text (albeit with some weird ASCII scattered through my prose).

wodenokoto• 4 months ago

The real issue is that to ship a Markdown parser you also need a to ship a friendly HTML parser.

I’ve never attempted a markdown parser let alone any parser, so pardon me for asking a stupid question: doesn’t the markdown parser just let through HTML? Why does a markdown parser need to parse html?

LAC-Tech• 4 months ago

I'd like to see a less flexible markdown standard. There's no reason to have 2 different ways of italics/bold etc. Pick one, reject other text.

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

Yes, there is. Different people have different preferences.

temporallobe• 4 months ago

MD is not perfect, but it’s perfectly adequate.

Markdown apologist here - I think MD is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I use it a LOT. In fact, one project I work on has an entire git repo of just MD docs. It’s easy to maintain, and even non-tech people can author them with ease. In fat, I love that raw MD is entirely human-readable, and even if someone fat-fingers some of the syntax, it’s still very forgiving.

Don’t forget, many MD renderers support regular HTML embedding, including <style> tags, which makes it a very flexible choice.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere!

somat• 4 months ago

It is because the primary target for markdown is what would in any other formatting language be the source. Markdown has no source. It is guidelines for good looking plain text layout that when followed can be used to make a typeset document.

Everybody sort of knows it sucks as a formatting language. But we love it anyway. The benefit of being able to get a typeset document from a nice looking plaintext document is just too convenient. It is why specialized markdown editors make no sense to me. Why would you target something as shitty as markdown if you have a specialized editor? But really, if you at all care about the semantics of your document don't write it in markdown. But more importantly please don't kill the utility of markdown by adding semantics to it, all that noise just make the plain text look bad.

Pinus• 4 months ago

Unfortunately, the plain text does not look good, and does not offer good control of the typesetting. At least, nearly all markdown I see is almost unreadable in its “raw” state. I’d much rather read manually formatted, monospaced, text. That way, you can use asterisks as bullets, as footnote markers and as emphasis markers all at the same time, and anyone who is familiar with normal typographic conventions will understand what is what.

danhau• 4 months ago

Not too long ago, I used to think that Markdown was the Bee‘s knees. But having been forced to write some documentation in plaintext, I learned that plaintext is significantly more readable than raw markdown.

I think one of Markdown‘s biggest sins is how it handles line breaks. Single line breaks being discarded in the output guarantees that your nicely formatted text will look worse when rendered. I understand there are use cases for this. But this and the „add a trailing space“ workaround are particularly terrible for code documentation.

cobertos• 4 months ago

Why would you target something as shitty as markdown if you have a specialized editor?

Your at-rest format allows you to use any tool to edit it. The specialized editor becomes a preferred tool, but not the only tool nor the most important one. Markdown and it's ecosystem came before the editor.

solarkraft• 4 months ago

Why would you target something as shitty as markdown if you have a specialized editor?

Because Markdown is the standard text formatting language. It’s the format everybody works in.

But really, if you at all care about the semantics of your document don't write it in markdown

But it’s the standard text formatting language everybody uses.

braebo• 4 months ago

Because it supports HTML as an escape hatch.

kang• 4 months ago

"No, I was and remain against establishing extensions. Markdown has thrived because it’s a small idea, not a spec, and thus embraces many variants to suit particularly needs and contexts." https://x.com/gruber/status/1495119598148009991

A thread on markdown creator's stance https://x.com/nalband/status/1625541479295860752

shevy-java• 4 months ago

These 2 produce IDENTICAL output. And this is just the tip of the iceberg?
It has so many poor decisions baked in that if you try to use it it will actively fight against you the moment you think you know what you’re doing.

That misses the point. The point of Markdown is simplicity, not perfection. And that is also the reason why Markdown will prevail.

eviks8• 4 months ago

This also misses the point: multiple syntax markers for the same thing is the opposite of simplicity (though that's not the reason why Markdown will fail)

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

You have the wrong end of the stick. The point is simplicity for the user, not the developer of the parser. And for users, having two ways to get the same thing adds no complexity- they just pick one and use it.

socalgal2• 4 months ago

I'm mostly fine with markdown, but I just wanted to comment, this example in the post

    # Hi
    
    I am a <ins> simple </ins> _programmer_ doing
    <span class="fancy-text"> elegant </span> programming.
    
    <div class="animation">
    
    And here is my portfolio
    
    </div>

Might not do you think it does. markdown does not include html parser per-se. It allowes HTML but has rules like

    I am a <span style="color:green">super *grinch* yall</span>

will generate

    <p>I am a <span style="color:green">super <b>grinch</b> yall</span></p

It doesn't see the span element and turn off parsing.

Similarly, the div in the first example produces div, p, close-p, close-div, because the rule isn't "find he closing tag". The rule is something like "if the line starts with html then stop parsing and just copy until the next blank line.

All that said, I know the rules and generally know how to follow them. Of course I still run into the issue that even though there's commonmark, every site and tool is running their own variation which are incompatible.

fyredge• 4 months ago

Markdown is the Python of documents. As technology, and consequently technical writing increase in complexity, any reduction in barrier to access becomes increasingly necessary. The opposite of using markdown and python leads to bike shedding.

Personally, I always default to the simplest of tools. That's why I truly believe that anything meant for actual human use needs to have reasonable defaults. No "look at all the configs you can have", but a "let's get you what you need".

ifh-hn• 4 months ago

I'm in no way saying that markdown is perfect but it is much better than anything else I've used. It's got me through both a bachelors and masters.

The author of this article appears to be unaware of pandoc, and even better quarto. I started with pandoc and various plugins and my own scripts but moved to quarto, it is excellent.

https://quarto.org/

oliwarner• 4 months ago

Because it's Good Enough™ in many use-cases.

A critique of MD carries no wind in my sails when it can't even appreciate why marrying multiple contemporary chat-grade formats into a document format might be a helpful thing.

Of course there are problems as you veer away from chat-like messaging, but it does a lot, and allows HTML when it can't go any further.

atoav• 4 months ago

I wrote my MA thesis in Markdown. The good thing about Markdown is that it forced you to just write and it had enough markup to be useful, but not so much thst you depend time procrastinating getting the output perfect (like LaTeX).

Pandoc can convert Markdown to .icml this is an Adobe InDesign format which allows you to go from markdown to a professional typesetting solution including figures, footnotes etc.

Of course if you write a physics or math paper there are better solutions, but for the majority of things you could write markdown is good enough and that is the reason so much of the content you encounter is in markdown.

Mikhail_Edoshin• 4 months ago

I always advocate for XML. While Markdown is like "a car in any color as long as it's black", XML is a) exactly what you need and b) as precise as you need it, and also c) not more precise than necessary.

We all need headers and paragraphs, right. But I might want file listings. Or command-line snippets with my own color coding and marks. Or C declarations and precise references to them in text. Or todos. Or bibliographic information. Or I want to express the difference between emphasis and italics. Or I don't. And so on. With XML I grow my own notation that fits like a glove. There's no boilerplate, everything is there for a purpose.

Besides, it is not that incompatible with plain text. Here's plain text:

    abc def ghi

Here's well-formed XML:

    <text>
    abc def ghi
    </text>

That's all, save for two extra newlines. Plain text is the best thing when you write to think. But once you're done with thinking you might want to add a date mark, a tag, or another more structured content. With XML you can have both.

eviks8• 4 months ago

That's all, save for two extra newlines

And save for two extra words and 5 extra symbols, which in many cases (like config files) draw out the actual content

XML is a) exactly what you need and b) as precise as you need it,

So how can I precisely get rid of that noise?

NetMageSCW14• 4 months ago

So format your post in Markdown and in XML and ask your grandmother to read them. (I assume she isn’t Grace Hopper.)

cush• 4 months ago

Just write in whatever language makes you happy. Nobody is forcing you to use markdown

elcapitan• 4 months ago

This post reminded me of Bjarne Stroustrup's famous quote "There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people complain about and those nobody uses".

kjgkjhfkjf• 4 months ago

Markdown is much easier to write quickly than HTML. Situations where I write Markdown quickly include writing messages on Slack and for AI chatbots. I wouldn't want to use HTML in either of those cases.

dexterlagan• 4 months ago

Bonus points for MD being readable even when it's not parsed. More bonus points for Sublime Text displaying it in plain text and still looking great. Good enough++

GZGavinZhao• 4 months ago

As always, honorable mention to Typst [0] as a good balance between the readability & simplicity of Markdown with the flexibility & composability of LaTeX. I think and hoping that Typst will be the future, but for now I'm happy with Markdown.

[0] https://typst.app

amai2• 4 months ago

From typst one cannot really create HTML, which makes typst unsuitable for online publishing.

tcfhgj• 4 months ago

https://typst.app/docs/web-app/export-and-preview/#html-prev...

Yanael• 4 months ago

I rarely render it and only use it with syntax highlighting in my text editor, and that’s it. It helps structure my notes, and I love it, KISS.

karl422• 4 months ago

https://djot.net/ seems to be very sane and still very similar to markdown. And after reading the CommonMark spec, I appreciate the saneness very much. CommonMark did a great job at describing all the rules and edge cases, but it clearly shows how messy markdown is.

What do you all think of Djot?

the_axiom• 4 months ago

it's amazing

eviks8• 4 months ago

too little (preserves weird whitespace semantics requiring extra newlines, non-obvious _under_ for /italics/ markers, confusing multitude of link syntax, too many and too few list markers (why isn't • allowed?) too late? But would've been a great start instead of the aborted markdown attempt back then...

mcookly• 4 months ago

Djot is great so far, and I'm eager to switch to it from Pandoc Markdown since editor support for Pandoc Markdown is lacking.

Looking at the repo's issues, I'm a bit concerned that it's already fragmented since some enthusiasts have implemented features far beyond, or against, Djot's spec. People seem impatient for v1.0...

karl422• 4 months ago

Do you see a way to help and improve the situation?

roryokane• 4 months ago

I like most of Djot’s simplifications, but its requirement to write nested lists with blank lines between every change in indentation is a dealbreaker for me:

  - Djot requires
  
    - writing nested lists
  
      - with blank lines in between
  
    - successive list items at the same level
    - can skip the blank line
  
      - but not this list item

Yes, supporting indented list items without blank lines in between would make Djot’s parser more complicated. But I write nested lists all the time in my notes, and extra blank lines would distract from the content. For me, it’s not worth it to make my raw text ugly just to make the file easier to parse.

Djot could have avoided the blank line requirement by not trying to join hard-wrapped lines back into one paragraph / list item. That would work for me because I only soft wrap my text. Djot’s choice to support hard wrapping caused all of its users (including those who hard wrap) to have worse nested list syntax.

prmph• 4 months ago

For me, one major issue with md is that it does not support indentation that could be used for collapsing sections.

Most md editors don't support collapsing or folding sections, even though they could. VSCode had this feature where indentation is used as a simple hint to support collapsible sections, but md treats indentation as a code hint.

R0m41nJosh• 4 months ago

This article is legit, but markdown is good enough to me. Actually, I was using reStructuredText which has a better specification for writing. I switched back to Markdown because its syntax is easier to remember and fulfill most of my needs. The thing I needed was comments for adding folding marks in vim. I use inline  to do so and that's OK.

oneeyedpigeon2• 4 months ago

how HTML is only a markup language and not a programming language.

This sentence is a great example of why such a pointless debate continues. Don't disparage HTML as "only" a markup language; it's a markup language. That's no 'better' or 'worse' than a programming language, just different.

bronlund2• 4 months ago

He at least admitted to be a simple monkey brained developer.

itmitica• 4 months ago

Why aren't you quietly stop using Markdown?

amai2• 4 months ago

The Pandoc Markdown dialect solves many of the mentioned issues. If you want a good editor for that have a look at

https://www.zettlr.com/

danieljanes• 4 months ago

We're not "still" using Markdown, we're only getting started.

Markdown is only going to get more popular as AI agents usage grows.

aquafox• 4 months ago

As someone who has written his PhD thesis in LaTeX, I wish Markdown, or more specifically Quarto, would have existed at that time. Spent too mich time setting up basic stuff that is now just 2 pre-defines styles away.

rssoconnor• 4 months ago

I was lamenting the other day that we used to have SGML SHORTREF, then XML came along because supposedly SGML is just too hard to parse. But XML is for computers, not for humans. So then we got Markdown, which is worse than where we started from.

red_admiral• 4 months ago

I'll give them credit for not just being another "markdown sucks, let's switch to RST" slop article. Even more so as they say they don't have a solution - because a solution would be like asking for 3/3 on "cheap, reliable, fast" or whatever your favorite version of "engineers are paid to make compromises" is.

Markdown is great at small-to-medium documents; LLMs seem to like it too possibly out of a combination of fairly logical design and lots of training examples.

Custom extensions like |||warning\nDisconnect from the internet befor trying this!\n||| get you a bit further and don't tie you into HTML.

The moment you need multiparagraph items including code blocks inside a numbered list that also has an unnumbered list child of which some of the items are images ... the person who set you that task probably doesn't understand good design, but regardless, I find you need something with an explicit tree structure, that is there are markers for both the start and end of each node such as <td> ... </td>. That necessarily makes the document harder to write, though at that complexity it'll probably be hard to read too.

bm5k• 4 months ago

Textile was better, but less popular IIRC

liampulles• 4 months ago

I used to write raw HTML for my blog because I needed more formatting and structural power than what Markdown could provide for Jekyll. Then I built my own little blog generator that uses Markdown and which pre-substitutes my own hacky syntax elements for the extras I need.

And this is what Markdown is for: its just enough above plain text such that you can get at least 95% of what you need for a blog post, whilst still have the source be easy to type and proof read.

xtiansimon• 4 months ago

Not sure I caught the author’s use case, but Markdown shines in the document space when you’re the author and user. It’s efficient and sufficient—lowest common denominator of ease of writing and formatting basic text.

And I say this while putting up with lousy Markdown rendering on a pet project (Django). Really needs a separate project which lets you massage the html to get the display looking it’s best.

Twey• 4 months ago

If we're going to define a programming language as one that is Turing complete, it's important (in a kind of pedantic sense) to note that that includes HTML (with CSS), which can be used to encode a Rule 110 automaton, and excludes C, whose standard imposes an (implementation-defined) upper bound on accessible memory, meaning it can never, even in principle†, similarly a Turing machine, which has infinite storage. This is probably not what was intended :)

† Obviously, for physical reasons given our current understanding of cosmology, no _implementation_ of a language can ever really be Turing-complete, but some language definitions are theoretically compatible with Turing-completeness, and others aren't.

adelks• 4 months ago

There's another markdown spec that's better mystmd.org

Astral09• 4 months ago

Clickbait

reagle• 4 months ago

This is why John MacFarlane designed djot https://djot.net/

nixpulvis• 4 months ago

One of markdown's greatest assets is that it's basically plaintext. Can't render it to HTML, it's still very readable.

This blog post makes no sense to me.

jrm4• 4 months ago

Because, and I cannot stress this enough:

Programming languages (and the like) are for humans, not for computers or for creating formal systems.

Understanding this simple fact will save you (and by you I mean me and the type of people who frequent sites like this) a ton of headache.

kaycebasques• 4 months ago

These 2 produce IDENTICAL output.

This is my single biggest complaint about reStructuredText. You create headings by putting underlines and (optional!) overlines around the section heading text. But all of the following are valid title adornment characters:

  ! " # $ % & ' ( ) \* + 
  , - . / : ; < = > ? @ 
  [ \ ] ^ _ ` { | } ~

So in each doc you have to figure out the H1, H2, H3 formatting separately. E.g. in one doc it's:

  ==
  H1
  ==

  Normal text

  --
  H2
  --

Whereas in another it might be:

  H1
  ~~

  Normal text

  !!
  H2
  !!

deknos• 4 months ago

i would not use html(5). XHTML? perhaps. but try to find 3 parsers, which parse html in the same way and not segfaulting.

It's not possible. HTML is worse. You need at least something, which on parsing does not segfault.

threesmegiste• 4 months ago

HTML tags contain letters. Naturel Language words also contain letters. But markdown tags don't contain letters, and when reading, tags and words don't get mixed up.

The issue is that simple.

m-p-3• 4 months ago

Because to me it's good enough, the syntax is simple and it's totally readable in plaintext, which makes it the ultimate format against vendor lock-in.

kelvinjps10• 4 months ago

for me as a user, I like it it's simple to use, I know for the developers it's probably very hard to parse and what not, but for most people the experience matters most. Also markdown you can use it without any parser just a text editor.

fayash• 4 months ago

I've actually tried some other markup languages like asciidoc, but went back to markdown since I found it's hard to cooperate with others with another markup language like asciidoc and it's harder to find something else than asciidoctor to render it. I could write blog posts in asciidoc but in order to make it parse-able for my SSG I'd still have to compile it to markdown.

gbro3n• 4 months ago

Because we need to get information down quickly, but still have the option of parsing to a presentable format. Markdown is not perfect, but it's far better for the efficient capture of information or document authoring. I recently built AS Notes for VS Code (https://www.asnotes.io). It's markdown based, with wikilinks, mermaid diagrams, with the ability to publish to github pages etc. There is no way I'm writing my day to day notes with HTML and anchor tags without it being a huge distraction. And HTML is so much harder to read in longform if you need to come back end edit your writing. Markdown is for humans where HTML was designed to be simple, but is ultimately for parsers.

mwkaufma• 4 months ago

As the comment count in this thread increases, the ratio responding to the headline alone, and nothing in the article, is approaching 1.0.

fg1372• 4 months ago

In a few years we'll all laugh at how ridiculous this blog post is.

If we are still using XML/YAML/JSON etc despite all their faults and shortcomings, Markdown can (and will) last decades.

xorvoid• 4 months ago

Strong disagree. Markdown is great. And the perfect format simply doesn't exist. You cannot be all things to all people. shrug

ForSpareParts• 4 months ago

As somebody who is currently trying to use structured markdown in obsidian for knowledge management and finding it a bit challenging, I agree with the author that markdown is not the ideal language for what he and I are trying to do with it, and that we'd probably be better served by something else. But I'm not necessarily convinced such a language would find a lot of adoption, because I suspect that most people using markdown aren't doing what we're doing, and are quite well served by what's there. Actually, I'm one of those people about 90% of the time -- I have never thought about any of this stuff while writing a readme or a forum post, and that's what MD is actually for. How many users are out there clamoring for a completely unambiguous markup language optimized for parsing and extensibility?

notepad0x90• 4 months ago

"we" aren't using anything, "you" are.

Use the best tool for the task. markdown is really good for talking to AI as a human for example.

Same goes for JSON, YAML, etc.. use what makes sense to you. I like markdown but I have issues with it as well. I like html, but i despise it sometimes. One-size-fits-all is the real enemy.

My view is that for all *langs (markdown, config, data, code, styling,etc..) we should leave the proverbial cave and come down from the trees, and talk about interoperability and best practices. Contracts, expectations, and exceptions.

There is this pattern where we invest in some software technology, and it becomes this ideology people fight over. Or invest a lot into it and fall into sunken-cost thinking.

Being able to rapidly figure out the best tool/solution, and readily tear out the old and patch in the new with minimal loss and friction, that should be the next era of tech. Not a repeat of the old, with a slight twist. I don't need another JSON, Markdown, HTML, CSS, C, Rust,etc.. especially with the advent of LLMs (hype aside), syntax is important but it isn't what it used to be. I want to be able to write in Markdown and know that if there is a better format, I can easily stop using it and reliably transpile all my existing Markdown, and tooling that works with Markdown to use that new format.

Adaptability and communication are the biggest dead-weights holding back technological progress.

tliltocatl• 4 months ago

Because Markdown is quite readable in plaintext form with no Markdown-specific rendering at all. HTML isn't.

bnolsen• 4 months ago

HTML is not something to hold up as the standard for documentation.

villmann• 4 months ago

Use LaTeX nice and simple

Why are we still using Markdown?

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