Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people.
>You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it.
No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.
>anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter.
Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
>Markdown will never get beyond developers.
Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers.
I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.
My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.
We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.
I also used git to manage changes.
This was 2009.
He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.
Fast forward to today.
My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).
Not in LaTex but in Markdown.
It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.
It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).
I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.
Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.
After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.
I think there is a business opportunity here.
Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.
1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places.
Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not just a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used  for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically.
2. The source quotation was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.
> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.
> Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.
> I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor.
That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG
The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects).
The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way to store formatted text without the horrors of full blown HTML. You can stick some markdown in a CMS database, render it on a webpage, and get the most common formatting: links, bullet points, bold. Great.
On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2.
But mixed in there, the author seems to have some weird assumptions that people are using Markdown primarily to write documentation, and this is somehow Markdown's fault. I genuinely don't understand this, or their point 13 "It’s 2022, we shouldn’t be using ascii-text to write documents."
Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.
> On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2.
There is a trade off here though. When people sit down to write something that doesn't have weird edge cases they're not likely to end up with a lightweight markup like Markdown.
So simultaneously the spec may be a complete disaster and a contributing factor Markdown's success. Much like how the human brain is very bad at adding numbers together and has so far effortlessly out-competed alternative species that had brains that were great at numbers but not vision processing (being great at adding numbers is so useless for an animal I assume the skill never evolved, but imagine there was a creature somewhere with amazing additive powers for the sake of argument).
Having an unambiguous spec could theoretically be a disadvantage to adoption outside of a very carefully designed markup.
For their major gripe that point 13 is a pretty weak one. Text editors can present a Markdown document any way you want, and even a WYSIWYG editor is possible if you like that.
Besides, Markdown fully supports alternate character encodings, not just ASCII (that would make Markdown really obsolete). Most people surely use UTF-8 for Markdown documents.
> Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.
Related to that, there's also an obvious "network effect" at play here. Every Mediawiki uses "wikitext" so to use Mediawiki you learn "wikitext". As a user you don't want to have to learn more than one of these syntaxes so you use whatever is most common. I think that's the tautological answer to headlining question "Why Is Markdown Popular?" network effects, specifically "Markdown is increasingly popular because Markdown is already popular". It's used in enough places and has to be learned by enough people that generally people learn Markdown. Once they've learned Markdown they expect to use it everywhere else (and so Markdown spreads).
(I had a time where I preferred reStructuredText and its increased power and capability and internal consistency over Markdown. At this point because of network effects, I've decided to just focus on Markdown like "everyone else", though.)
I came to the same conclusion years ago and made myself and "alternate" markdown-like format that superficially looks the same, but has a grammar compatible with parser generators like ANTLR.
Took me about a week to produce something that could generate a nice document object model, and spit out HTML (or anything you please).
The concept is powerful. The specific Markdown implementation however is too messy for proper tooling.
The article actually fails to answer the question in the title. It's a long list of reasons the author believes it should not be popular. But it clearly is massively popular. So maybe there's something wrong with his line of reasoning?
Anyway, Markdown emerged out of the Ruby community. So it's not strange that there is no specification. Ruby is a dynamically typed language so, ruby programmers tend to not specify a lot of things like types or schemas. And indeed the Ruby language it self is a bit under-specified. The spec is simply "whatever ruby does is what it does", which sucks for alternate implementations like JRuby. The same is true for Markdown. Whatever the original markdown library does was the spec. And it has since been loosely implemented by others doing their own Markdown derivatives. Like the widely used Github flavor. Which is also a ruby based implementation, I think. So it is similarly under specified.
However, the lack of a specification is not much of an issue since markdown is used by humans to be turned into something human readable with some html formatting. Either it's readable or you fix it. And it's simple enough that any markup typos in markdown are usually not that big of a deal. The main goal of Markdown is to get out of the user's way so they can focus on content rather than formatting.
As for editors. There are plenty of editors that support markdown. Many of them even have live previews. So, it's great for that.
In my experience it works pretty well for non-developers. I added it to our email client years ago as an alternative to the WYSIWYG editor, and quite a few non-developers liked and used it. Also see Reddit, which uses it. While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there.
As for the larger point: do I have a great love of Markdown? Not really; I think some of the other similar formats are better. But it works "well enough", and switching syntaxes is hard so I "just use Markdown" . I hate the "GitHub flavoured Markdown" with a passion though; the way it deals with newlines is just fundamentally broken and it's inconsistent even on GitHub where some things are GFM and some things are not (which they need to be, because GFM is fundamentally broken) leading to sillyness like copy/pasting text from one part of GitHub to another part ending up with badly formatted text.
Either way, whatever the faults of Markdown may be, I sure as hell prefer it over any HTML subset. Writing <i>emphasis</i> is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; there's few things I dislike more than having to focus on the presentation as I'm writing something.
In every company there will be a few who just can't grasp Markdown, but they can't grasp any markup language, and struggle in WYSIWYG editors (like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Google Docs) too (usually not grasping the concept of the document outline created by applying header styles correctly).
The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technological silver bullet to solve it.
Newlines in Markdown are pretty weirdly implemented, certainly! The canonical markup seems to be to make paragraphs by having two newlines (which all tools do), and to have an actual newline within a paragraph by ending the preceding sentence with two spaces and a newline. I'd love it if all tools did that, but an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.
> Writing <i>emphasis</i> is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*;
The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it.
I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted.
Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.
I agree and have had success teaching job-devs to use and even create markdown files for project documentation and stuff like that.
It’s also frequently coupled with “learning git” and I’ve found it helpful in governance processes where someone needs to approve or make sight revisions to something before approval. It’s better than signing word documents and emailing them around.
> While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there.
Every time someone tries to do a list (eg cooking recipes) they fail hard, because both the need to have a two newlines for a one newline and a unnumbered list for a numbered list is thing which surely is out of knowledge of Average Joe. Even consulting a help doesn't help sometimes.
"New" Reddit solved it by having a WYSIWYG editor, but even then things get out of hand sometimes.
All complaints basically seem to boil down to these two:
* It's not standardised
* I don't like using it
I think the two big advantages of markdown are simply:
* It's readable without having to parse it
* A lot of people do like using it
Replacing it with HTML, as useful as HTML is for its intended purpose, sounds like an incredibly bad idea. There's a very good reason why markdown won: its readability. Except for tables, but that's why people don't use them. It's not meant to be suitable for every conceivable purpose, it's meant to be readable.
Using a rich text editor for it sounds like a bad idea to me, because you don't know what the raw text is going to look like. And yes, I do type > for blockquotes. It's not very hard to do.
Should we have a single standard for markdown? The lack of one seems to be the primary disadvantage of markdown, but personally I'm not sure it really needs a standard. It's pretty simple and I don't think it really needs to be portable. But it would certainly be nice to have a standard.
Use of block quotes is rare anyway. It's just very practical, easy to adjust, its output fairly well matches your expectation. It covers 99% of your everyday needs.
> Adding in any sort of extra meta data usually requires using YAML, the rules of which are a mystery to me.
That's not the fault of Markdown and not part of Markdown at all. Markdown doesn't say anything about metadata. Use of YAML at the top of Markdown documents was invented elsewhere (Jekyll, I believe), and any tools can use whatever they like.
> Numbered lists. Again, you need to use an editor to stay sane.
Or you can just type 1. in front of every line and let the Markdown renderer take care of numbering.
> What the hell are task lists anyways? Why do they exist?
Again, not a standard Markdown feature. They are a GitHub invention for adding checkboxes to issues and tracking the progress of things. They're convenient for places like GitHub, but if you're writing some documentation, you can just ignore them.
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc.
YAGNI. And many of those would not necessarily be part of the Markdown document - in a blog, the <article> would be outside of Markdown and instead part of the main template (which is by necessity HTMLish).
> Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all.
Why not? I can just copy-paste the embed widget from YouTube and paste it in my Markdown. The (Gruber) spec allows HTML inside Markdown. A thing that knows how to turn a link to the social-media-site-du-jour into a nice widget is outside the scope of a simple markup language (it would need a large database and constant updates).
Just get into copy pasting stuff from word to some browser rich text field - people will expect it works flawlessly but I know it will break in dozen different ways.
Problem is not with markdown - problem is with rich text in general.
Markdown is useful as it limits the options to make stuff easier. Argument that you need post process it to be useful is not that good - because that is the point of markdown you have "raw" data that is easy to post process any way you want. If you need some really fancy embeds and changes then maybe it is just not the right tool?
I don't use tables in markdown (besides maybe 3-rows 3-columns) but if you need more you probably should just stick with word/excel. I don't see a way to make tables in ASCII/UTF that would not suck.
It's almost like we need some kind of lightweight markup language like HTML that lets us focus more on the content, with less boilerplate... so something like markdown in other words, then?
I don't think the problems Russel mentions are as big of a deal. I've never encountered an issue due to the inconsistent spec. The basic markdown practices are so simple they just work, and when they don't it's clear you need to make a slight adjustment. At worst you are missing something you want to use that's not available in the flavor at hand. In the places I commonly write markdown there is no need for a complex tool-chain to render it as HTML, it's either a real-time part of the apps I use, or I consume it as plain text.
I'd be curious how Mozilla is finding it. I know it's a favorite among bloggers, but I'm not sure about such rich documentation as MDM, the quality of which has never been better in my view.
I think we need to invent new ways to store and retrieve enriched/inter-related/hierarchical data in a way that's convenient, interoperable and ubiquitous. I can't think of any though, can you? Something like a relational database, but lightweight like plain text, but richer, like a website.
I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it.
ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on.
Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.
The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it.
Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document.
The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use.
I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great.
Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.
I'm always having to look up the link format for reddit, and I always seem to get it backwards one-way-or-another first try. That's where markdown breaks down, at least for my uses. When you get beyond headings, lists, bold and italics, the complexity increases sharply.
Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures.
<b>this is bold</b> is really not much different <a href="">This is a link</a> and the heirarchy of <table> <tr> <td>.
My mnemonic is that the parentheses are a following sidenote that can always be skipped by the reader in normal writing. The hyperlink to follow for more information is the parenthetical.
Then the brackets are literally bracketing the text that should be styled as a hyperlink.
My sister, ex-chef curently a biology student at the uni, have no idea how to develop or how to fix her computer issues. She uses joplin, and edit her markdown notes through a text editor. She told me it took her 5 minutes to understand how to add images (and she still don't understand how the alignment works, but to be fair, only LateX is working well for this).
In fact, not using a WYSIWYG editor have an advantage if you're not a professionnal Word user: you don't loose time fiddling with the setting, selectionning texts, not getting why you should backspace twice here and once there (Fuck you Jira) and remove all "automagic".
I made a post about powershell yesterday and explained that to me, while PS was more pwerfull than bash (and easier), my lack of understanding and trust made me wary. Someone responded to me on a tangent on ExtJS: `it's a really good example of "simple vs. easy"`. This is the case here. Markdown is just simple (for the user).
I think my brother tried to taught her vim and build her a customized vim with markdown, surround, biology french dictionnaries[0] and a better autocomplete, but i don't think she uses it (because while it is easier, it is not simple. Hey, same thing!).
[0] I had no idea you could do this, but he made it so that if she was in the "marine biology" folder, she have a different dictionnary than if she is in the "microbiology" or "chemistry" folder. This made my LaTeX-fu even better than in was.
Hi,
It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. »
“I don’t like popular thing. It sucks. There should be something better.”
Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable.
I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.
I'd like Markdown if things were non-arbitrary. Is asterisk or underline italics? Does the href go before or after the link text? And I have no idea what the format of lists is, I guess you just put "-" or "1." and it automatically recognizes it?
> Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes
I bet you can teach people the subset of HTML that includes the Markdown features in about five minutes, too.
Did the author just look past Slack, Reddit, Discord, Teams, and more? I am honestly lost how one could make such a statement when its already in so many places where the primary audience is non-developers. They even list Reddit in their own post, but still make this statement?!
I actually love using plain text to create documents, but I'm also bothered by the irregularity and non-extensibility of Markdown, which is why I created xidoc: https://xidoc.nim.town/
Let me commend you on this effort. I would definitely consider using it in a situation where markdown did not suffice. It does require nim and nimble to be installed but that doesn't bother me.
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all.
While most other complaints sounded more like the typical markdown grumpiness I've heard before, I do find this an interesting argument. Why even have article, section, etc. if markdown ensures we're never going to use it? It's not like these are truly exotic tags that are complicated in their usage. Of course if you allow mixing html tags with markdown this is a bit of a non-problem in practice.
The point of Markdown isn't to replace HTML. It lets you write a plaintext document that can be post-processed into a rich text document (including HTML). It doesn't define the rich text template, styling, or anything else. It certainly isn't meant to have a 1:1 relationship with every HTML element.
With Markdown I can type up a document in the most brain dead of editors. I can then effectively read that document in the most brain dead of readers, event just printing it to a terminal. That simple document I can run through any number of post-processors and get great looking documents in a variety of delivery formats.
There seems to be some conflating going on here. As the author mentioned, the spec space is a scattered mess. For the same reason, all markdown to HTML compilers are following their own rules (unless they specifically call out the recommendations of one of the specs.) So if you are getting crappy HTML output, get (or write since it's so simple) a better compiler. Many markdown to HTML tools will let you apply templates and specify which tags to use for a given piece of markup. For the layperson that's probably asking a lot but for the technical crowd, it's your own fault if you aren't happy with the output
Currently finishing my third (full-length academic) book in markdown. Wrote the second book in markdown too. Wrote the first book in MS word. Never going back.
Here's the thing. Word is a buggy bloated piece of shit application with an incomprehensible and ever-changing UI that requires 20 mouse clicks hunting through badly labeled menus to do anything. Latex is far too complicated for prose that doesn't have equations all in it, and is also unsupported by publishers outside of the sciences. Alternative word processors (OpenOffice, Pages, the desiccated shell of WordPerfect) are either buggy, ugly, unmaintained, lack critical features, or all of the above.
So I just write in markdown in emacs. Markdown mode in emacs works very well, I have hardly any customizations on top. One file per chapter. References in zotero, insert citations in better bibtex. Compile it all in pandoc.
When I want to revise I just concatenate the files and compile it to PDF and read my own work there. When I want to submit to a publisher I just compile it to word. I have a makefile that handles all of that for me. Then I make a few tiny tweaks in the garbage program and submit.
This is the best workflow I've ever found for academic writing, because pandoc-enhanced markdown and better bibtex enhanced zotero give you everything you really need for academic writing (like control over reference formats), and nothing you don't need (endless nightmarish word bloat). And you can just store it all in a GitHub repo.
[+] [-] Falkon1313|3 years ago|reply
Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people.
>You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it.
No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point.
>anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter.
Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
>Markdown will never get beyond developers.
Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers.
I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.
[+] [-] virtualritz|3 years ago|reply
My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.
We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.
I also used git to manage changes.
This was 2009.
He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.
Fast forward to today.
My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).
Not in LaTex but in Markdown.
It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.
It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).
I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.
Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.
After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.
I think there is a business opportunity here.
Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|3 years ago|reply
1. The article conflated lightweight markup languages as a class and Markdown in various places, and you’re making it worse by performing that conflation in different places.
Markdown was a specific invention which took parts of ancient customs (some from at least as far back as the typewriter era), but applied various other rules never before seen. It was absolutely not just a codification of already-existing usage. As probably the clearest demonstration of this: no one would ever have used  for images before Markdown. Interpret the remark “it’s barely a spec” in this light: it’s speaking of Markdown specifically.
2. The source quotation was talking about tables, not Markdown as a whole.
[+] [-] threatofrain|3 years ago|reply
> Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter.
You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
[+] [-] pcthrowaway|3 years ago|reply
I mean here we are using markdown in hacker news comments where there won't even be any formatting.
But before "new reddit", everyone was using Markdown in reddit as well. And no, not everyone who uses reddit is a programmer
[+] [-] FinnKuhn|3 years ago|reply
considering that the only option to format text in programs like discord is a "light" version of markdown I would say many younger folks have at least a basic understanding of how markdown works.
[+] [-] maximus-decimus|3 years ago|reply
That's basically what Obsidian does. If you right click on the editor pane, you can select "edit mode" which makes it act move like VSCode (pure text with bolding/italics), but the default move is WYSIWYG
[+] [-] ZiiS|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chopin|3 years ago|reply
Afaik GitHub and Stackoverflow use markdown WYSIWYG editors. That'd cover a big chunk of users.
[+] [-] stevage|3 years ago|reply
The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way to store formatted text without the horrors of full blown HTML. You can stick some markdown in a CMS database, render it on a webpage, and get the most common formatting: links, bullet points, bold. Great.
On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2.
But mixed in there, the author seems to have some weird assumptions that people are using Markdown primarily to write documentation, and this is somehow Markdown's fault. I genuinely don't understand this, or their point 13 "It’s 2022, we shouldn’t be using ascii-text to write documents."
Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.
[+] [-] roenxi|3 years ago|reply
There is a trade off here though. When people sit down to write something that doesn't have weird edge cases they're not likely to end up with a lightweight markup like Markdown.
So simultaneously the spec may be a complete disaster and a contributing factor Markdown's success. Much like how the human brain is very bad at adding numbers together and has so far effortlessly out-competed alternative species that had brains that were great at numbers but not vision processing (being great at adding numbers is so useless for an animal I assume the skill never evolved, but imagine there was a creature somewhere with amazing additive powers for the sake of argument).
Having an unambiguous spec could theoretically be a disadvantage to adoption outside of a very carefully designed markup.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|3 years ago|reply
Besides, Markdown fully supports alternate character encodings, not just ASCII (that would make Markdown really obsolete). Most people surely use UTF-8 for Markdown documents.
[+] [-] WorldMaker|3 years ago|reply
Related to that, there's also an obvious "network effect" at play here. Every Mediawiki uses "wikitext" so to use Mediawiki you learn "wikitext". As a user you don't want to have to learn more than one of these syntaxes so you use whatever is most common. I think that's the tautological answer to headlining question "Why Is Markdown Popular?" network effects, specifically "Markdown is increasingly popular because Markdown is already popular". It's used in enough places and has to be learned by enough people that generally people learn Markdown. Once they've learned Markdown they expect to use it everywhere else (and so Markdown spreads).
(I had a time where I preferred reStructuredText and its increased power and capability and internal consistency over Markdown. At this point because of network effects, I've decided to just focus on Markdown like "everyone else", though.)
[+] [-] jiggawatts|3 years ago|reply
Took me about a week to produce something that could generate a nice document object model, and spit out HTML (or anything you please).
The concept is powerful. The specific Markdown implementation however is too messy for proper tooling.
[+] [-] azangru|3 years ago|reply
Isn't it markup?
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, Markdown emerged out of the Ruby community. So it's not strange that there is no specification. Ruby is a dynamically typed language so, ruby programmers tend to not specify a lot of things like types or schemas. And indeed the Ruby language it self is a bit under-specified. The spec is simply "whatever ruby does is what it does", which sucks for alternate implementations like JRuby. The same is true for Markdown. Whatever the original markdown library does was the spec. And it has since been loosely implemented by others doing their own Markdown derivatives. Like the widely used Github flavor. Which is also a ruby based implementation, I think. So it is similarly under specified.
However, the lack of a specification is not much of an issue since markdown is used by humans to be turned into something human readable with some html formatting. Either it's readable or you fix it. And it's simple enough that any markup typos in markdown are usually not that big of a deal. The main goal of Markdown is to get out of the user's way so they can focus on content rather than formatting.
As for editors. There are plenty of editors that support markdown. Many of them even have live previews. So, it's great for that.
[+] [-] Beltalowda|3 years ago|reply
In my experience it works pretty well for non-developers. I added it to our email client years ago as an alternative to the WYSIWYG editor, and quite a few non-developers liked and used it. Also see Reddit, which uses it. While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there.
As for the larger point: do I have a great love of Markdown? Not really; I think some of the other similar formats are better. But it works "well enough", and switching syntaxes is hard so I "just use Markdown" . I hate the "GitHub flavoured Markdown" with a passion though; the way it deals with newlines is just fundamentally broken and it's inconsistent even on GitHub where some things are GFM and some things are not (which they need to be, because GFM is fundamentally broken) leading to sillyness like copy/pasting text from one part of GitHub to another part ending up with badly formatted text.
Either way, whatever the faults of Markdown may be, I sure as hell prefer it over any HTML subset. Writing <i>emphasis</i> is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; there's few things I dislike more than having to focus on the presentation as I'm writing something.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|3 years ago|reply
The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technological silver bullet to solve it.
Newlines in Markdown are pretty weirdly implemented, certainly! The canonical markup seems to be to make paragraphs by having two newlines (which all tools do), and to have an actual newline within a paragraph by ending the preceding sentence with two spaces and a newline. I'd love it if all tools did that, but an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.
[+] [-] Lio|3 years ago|reply
The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it.
I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted.
Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.
[+] [-] prepend|3 years ago|reply
It’s also frequently coupled with “learning git” and I’ve found it helpful in governance processes where someone needs to approve or make sight revisions to something before approval. It’s better than signing word documents and emailing them around.
[+] [-] justsomehnguy|3 years ago|reply
Every time someone tries to do a list (eg cooking recipes) they fail hard, because both the need to have a two newlines for a one newline and a unnumbered list for a numbered list is thing which surely is out of knowledge of Average Joe. Even consulting a help doesn't help sometimes.
"New" Reddit solved it by having a WYSIWYG editor, but even then things get out of hand sometimes.
[+] [-] rhdunn|3 years ago|reply
Even things like Twine (interactive fiction text adventures) have a Markdown-like syntax.
[+] [-] mcv|3 years ago|reply
* It's not standardised
* I don't like using it
I think the two big advantages of markdown are simply:
* It's readable without having to parse it
* A lot of people do like using it
Replacing it with HTML, as useful as HTML is for its intended purpose, sounds like an incredibly bad idea. There's a very good reason why markdown won: its readability. Except for tables, but that's why people don't use them. It's not meant to be suitable for every conceivable purpose, it's meant to be readable.
Using a rich text editor for it sounds like a bad idea to me, because you don't know what the raw text is going to look like. And yes, I do type > for blockquotes. It's not very hard to do.
Should we have a single standard for markdown? The lack of one seems to be the primary disadvantage of markdown, but personally I'm not sure it really needs a standard. It's pretty simple and I don't think it really needs to be portable. But it would certainly be nice to have a standard.
[+] [-] tgv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kwpolska|3 years ago|reply
That's not the fault of Markdown and not part of Markdown at all. Markdown doesn't say anything about metadata. Use of YAML at the top of Markdown documents was invented elsewhere (Jekyll, I believe), and any tools can use whatever they like.
> Numbered lists. Again, you need to use an editor to stay sane.
Or you can just type 1. in front of every line and let the Markdown renderer take care of numbering.
> What the hell are task lists anyways? Why do they exist?
Again, not a standard Markdown feature. They are a GitHub invention for adding checkboxes to issues and tracking the progress of things. They're convenient for places like GitHub, but if you're writing some documentation, you can just ignore them.
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc.
YAGNI. And many of those would not necessarily be part of the Markdown document - in a blog, the <article> would be outside of Markdown and instead part of the main template (which is by necessity HTMLish).
> Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all.
Why not? I can just copy-paste the embed widget from YouTube and paste it in my Markdown. The (Gruber) spec allows HTML inside Markdown. A thing that knows how to turn a link to the social-media-site-du-jour into a nice widget is outside the scope of a simple markup language (it would need a large database and constant updates).
[+] [-] ozim|3 years ago|reply
Just get into copy pasting stuff from word to some browser rich text field - people will expect it works flawlessly but I know it will break in dozen different ways.
Problem is not with markdown - problem is with rich text in general.
Markdown is useful as it limits the options to make stuff easier. Argument that you need post process it to be useful is not that good - because that is the point of markdown you have "raw" data that is easy to post process any way you want. If you need some really fancy embeds and changes then maybe it is just not the right tool?
I don't use tables in markdown (besides maybe 3-rows 3-columns) but if you need more you probably should just stick with word/excel. I don't see a way to make tables in ASCII/UTF that would not suck.
[+] [-] afarviral|3 years ago|reply
I don't think the problems Russel mentions are as big of a deal. I've never encountered an issue due to the inconsistent spec. The basic markdown practices are so simple they just work, and when they don't it's clear you need to make a slight adjustment. At worst you are missing something you want to use that's not available in the flavor at hand. In the places I commonly write markdown there is no need for a complex tool-chain to render it as HTML, it's either a real-time part of the apps I use, or I consume it as plain text.
I'd be curious how Mozilla is finding it. I know it's a favorite among bloggers, but I'm not sure about such rich documentation as MDM, the quality of which has never been better in my view.
I think we need to invent new ways to store and retrieve enriched/inter-related/hierarchical data in a way that's convenient, interoperable and ubiquitous. I can't think of any though, can you? Something like a relational database, but lightweight like plain text, but richer, like a website.
[+] [-] endtime|3 years ago|reply
Yes they are, and no they aren't, respectively.
[+] [-] Gordonjcp|3 years ago|reply
ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on.
Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.
[+] [-] MattPalmer1086|3 years ago|reply
Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document.
The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use.
I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great.
Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.
[+] [-] WolfOliver|3 years ago|reply
Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one?
[text](http://url) [http://url](text) (http://url)[text] (text)[http://url]
[+] [-] ixtenu|3 years ago|reply
"square the circle"
The Markdown link format is [text](url) and [] is square-ish and () is circle-ish.
Your mileage may vary (as with any mnemonic), but this one works for me.
[+] [-] infensus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrVandemar|3 years ago|reply
Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures.
<b>this is bold</b> is really not much different <a href="">This is a link</a> and the heirarchy of <table> <tr> <td>.
[+] [-] ycombobreaker|3 years ago|reply
Then the brackets are literally bracketing the text that should be styled as a hyperlink.
[+] [-] xigoi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orwin|3 years ago|reply
In fact, not using a WYSIWYG editor have an advantage if you're not a professionnal Word user: you don't loose time fiddling with the setting, selectionning texts, not getting why you should backspace twice here and once there (Fuck you Jira) and remove all "automagic".
I made a post about powershell yesterday and explained that to me, while PS was more pwerfull than bash (and easier), my lack of understanding and trust made me wary. Someone responded to me on a tangent on ExtJS: `it's a really good example of "simple vs. easy"`. This is the case here. Markdown is just simple (for the user).
I think my brother tried to taught her vim and build her a customized vim with markdown, surround, biology french dictionnaries[0] and a better autocomplete, but i don't think she uses it (because while it is easier, it is not simple. Hey, same thing!).
[0] I had no idea you could do this, but he made it so that if she was in the "marine biology" folder, she have a different dictionnary than if she is in the "microbiology" or "chemistry" folder. This made my LaTeX-fu even better than in was.
[+] [-] martyalain|3 years ago|reply
The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/
What do you think of this answer?
[+] [-] prepend|3 years ago|reply
Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable.
I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.
[+] [-] prewett|3 years ago|reply
> Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes
I bet you can teach people the subset of HTML that includes the Markdown features in about five minutes, too.
[+] [-] wallmountedtv|3 years ago|reply
Did the author just look past Slack, Reddit, Discord, Teams, and more? I am honestly lost how one could make such a statement when its already in so many places where the primary audience is non-developers. They even list Reddit in their own post, but still make this statement?!
[+] [-] xigoi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] I_complete_me|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanderZwan|3 years ago|reply
While most other complaints sounded more like the typical markdown grumpiness I've heard before, I do find this an interesting argument. Why even have article, section, etc. if markdown ensures we're never going to use it? It's not like these are truly exotic tags that are complicated in their usage. Of course if you allow mixing html tags with markdown this is a bit of a non-problem in practice.
[+] [-] giantrobot|3 years ago|reply
With Markdown I can type up a document in the most brain dead of editors. I can then effectively read that document in the most brain dead of readers, event just printing it to a terminal. That simple document I can run through any number of post-processors and get great looking documents in a variety of delivery formats.
[+] [-] mcluck|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paultopia|3 years ago|reply
Here's the thing. Word is a buggy bloated piece of shit application with an incomprehensible and ever-changing UI that requires 20 mouse clicks hunting through badly labeled menus to do anything. Latex is far too complicated for prose that doesn't have equations all in it, and is also unsupported by publishers outside of the sciences. Alternative word processors (OpenOffice, Pages, the desiccated shell of WordPerfect) are either buggy, ugly, unmaintained, lack critical features, or all of the above.
So I just write in markdown in emacs. Markdown mode in emacs works very well, I have hardly any customizations on top. One file per chapter. References in zotero, insert citations in better bibtex. Compile it all in pandoc.
When I want to revise I just concatenate the files and compile it to PDF and read my own work there. When I want to submit to a publisher I just compile it to word. I have a makefile that handles all of that for me. Then I make a few tiny tweaks in the garbage program and submit.
This is the best workflow I've ever found for academic writing, because pandoc-enhanced markdown and better bibtex enhanced zotero give you everything you really need for academic writing (like control over reference formats), and nothing you don't need (endless nightmarish word bloat). And you can just store it all in a GitHub repo.
[+] [-] tambourine_man|3 years ago|reply
That’s not a markdown-only characteristic, it’s the same with HTML.
> Markdown will never get beyond developers
Ever heard of WhatsApp? A few billion people use it everyday.
[+] [-] gerikson|3 years ago|reply