[dschuessler]

You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this.

So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

[throwaway150]

> You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.

That is well known and I am sure the author is aware of it. The problem they are describing is not whether HTML is technically allowed inside Markdown. It's that when you are writing Markdown, you are writing Markdown, not HTML, and that comes with some problems.

> It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't.

In theory, yes. In practice, using Markdown becomes much less appealing once you start dropping raw HTML all over the place. The whole point of choosing Markdown is that you do not want to spend your time typing <p>, <a>, <li> and the rest. You want to write in Markdown, with only occasional HTML when absolutely necessary.

That is exactly where the author's complaints become relevant. If the solution to Markdown's limitations is routinely switching to HTML, then the argument becomes circular. If you are expected to write HTML to address the author's complaints, why bother with Markdown at all? If the answer is just "write HTML", then you may as well skip Markdown in the first place.

[euroderf]

> why bother with Markdown at all?

Maybe it's an 80-20 thang ? Your page is mostly MD that's easy on the eyes, but with "shelling out" for semantics like section or aside ?

[Terretta]

> The whole point of choosing Markdown is that you do not want to spend your time typing <p>, <a>, <li> and the rest. You want to write in Markdown, with only occasional HTML when absolutely necessary.

Why is that a problem?

> If the solution to Markdown's limitations is routinely switching to HTML, then...

Why would you do that, instead of only switching if you had to?

Why would the alternative be "just HTML" and write all the nonsense you said one doesn't have to?

[vorpalhex]

Most markdown engines allow short tags to stand in for html, so for frequent features you can just use a short tag.

Alternatively you can extend markdown. I wrote a simple text based game engine that was markdown based but I needed some arbitrary additions appropriate for a game.. so I just added a few elements.

[fastasucan]

>why bother with Markdown at all?

Because a little html is less html than "everything in html".

[henrebotha]

There are real limitations to this: You can't arbitrarily mix and match HTML and Markdown. As soon as you introduce an HTML block, you're locked out of Markdown syntax.

AsciiDoc lets you mix and match however you want. Or, put differently: AsciiDoc's superiority over Markdown extends even to being better at shelling out to HTML.

[vidarh]

While that's true, I'd take Markdown + extensions to allow inline HTML or custom tags over AsciiDoc any day, even at the cost of losing some compatibility - converting that to plain Markdown is usually easy enough.

[youngtaff]

O’Reilly’s authoring system used to use AsciiDoc (may still do), made me hate AsciiDoc

[tefkah]

mdx does tho. you could just not define any components, then you can nest markdown inside html no problem

[littlestymaar]

> I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this.

Reddit surely doesn't, and I'd be very surprised if github did.

In practice, in any place you want untrusted users writing markdown stuff for formatting, you cannot allow arbitrary HTML for security reasons.

[gen2brain]

I often use <img> with "width" on GitHub, so that I do not have the scrollbars on the main page, and one can click on the image to see the original size. It is ugly, but what is the alternative in Markdown? Several images instead of one?

[thayne]

Github has a very limited subset of html that is allowed.

Slack doesn't allow html (although it also doesn't allow all markdown).

If you are converting to something other than html, such as a manpage, using html tags generally doesn't work.

[immibis]

Why's anyone still using Reddit? I heard they just locked down their API again, to verified developers now.

[a3w]

I also used pandoc and markdown, and never bothered going back to ascidoc, full HTML, or latex.

Footnotes are the only not always included extension to mmarkdown I need for slides or argument flows that are not killed by sidenotes, and some sites and toolings support that in markdown.

Even table of contents is not a problem, so what else is left? Formula setting? Buttons for UI vs function? Buttons plus Inline JS for step by step state modification?

I am not programming, I want text and something to be easily pasted into Word-like rich text, which seems to be the default text editor for emails for 90% of the population.

[hizanberg]

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