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I prefer writing markdown to html. I want an automatic table of contents. Source code highlighting is nice too. I use mdbook and not Jekyll anymore, but it's

I prefer writing markdown to html. I want an automatic table of contents. Source code highlighting is nice too. I use mdbook and not Jekyll anymore, but it's similar stuff.

enriquto 9y ago
> I prefer writing markdown to html. Really? Well, this is just personal preference. I actually find html clearer for very simple documents. There are so many different markdown flavors that it is in practice rather ambiguous. You cannot easily copy markdown text from one conntext to another. For html, it is much easier. > I want an automatic table of contents. That's a really good reason, and probably the only reason that i can imagine to use generators. > Source code highlighting is nice too. I have been beaten not once, not twice, but three times by silent changes in jekyll setups that changed the rendering of my code (so everything looked really bad, with negative red blocks, etc). I hated this so much, and was so enraged, that I converted all my documents to pure html and now I am much happier. The reasons for the changes that broke my pages were completely banal ones, like moving from pygments to ruby-whatever (or vice-versa), etc.
- gog 9y ago
  > There are so many different markdown flavors that it is in practice rather ambiguous. Just use ones that follow http://commonmark.org/ http://commonmark.org/ They should render the same.
  - enriquto 9y ago
    the problem is not so much the markdown itself, but the variety of plugins. In practice, a simple "apt-get upgrade" may break markdown rendering.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  The nice thing about generators IMO is that when you want to change something on every page (a simple example being a <meta> tag or the page heading) you just have to update the template and run the script, instead of updating every file. I don't really love Jekyll either, that's why I have my own generator written in Node, and my dependencies are defined strictly in my package.json to keep things like markdown parsing from breaking. Heck, generators can just be a sh script with some sed commands.

I prefer writing markdown to html. I want an automatic table of contents. Source code highlighting is nice too. I use mdbook and not Jekyll anymore, but it's similar stuff.

enriquto 9y ago

> I prefer writing markdown to html. Really? Well, this is just personal preference. I actually find html clearer for very simple documents. There are so many different markdown flavors that it is in practice rather ambiguous. You cannot easily copy markdown text from one conntext to another. For html, it is much easier. > I want an automatic table of contents. That's a really good reason, and probably the only reason that i can imagine to use generators. > Source code highlighting is nice too. I have been beaten not once, not twice, but three times by silent changes in jekyll setups that changed the rendering of my code (so everything looked really bad, with negative red blocks, etc). I hated this so much, and was so enraged, that I converted all my documents to pure html and now I am much happier. The reasons for the changes that broke my pages were completely banal ones, like moving from pygments to ruby-whatever (or vice-versa), etc.

gog 9y ago
> There are so many different markdown flavors that it is in practice rather ambiguous. Just use ones that follow http://commonmark.org/ http://commonmark.org/ They should render the same.
- enriquto 9y ago
  the problem is not so much the markdown itself, but the variety of plugins. In practice, a simple "apt-get upgrade" may break markdown rendering.
fenwick67 9y ago
The nice thing about generators IMO is that when you want to change something on every page (a simple example being a <meta> tag or the page heading) you just have to update the template and run the script, instead of updating every file. I don't really love Jekyll either, that's why I have my own generator written in Node, and my dependencies are defined strictly in my package.json to keep things like markdown parsing from breaking. Heck, generators can just be a sh script with some sed commands.