alt Hacker NewsWhy are we still using Markdown?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I love markdown for technical reporting when the alternative was a hacked together Word document.
There's another markdown spec that's better mystmd.org
These examples are contrived af.
Nobody uses markdown like that bro. We like markdown because it's easy to read both rendered and raw.
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.
> 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.
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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.
Clickbait