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I'm iffy on this kind of thing. Markdown has the advantage of looking roughly like what you'd do in plain text and is completely readable in plain text with no
by SwellJoe 9y ago
I'm iffy on this kind of thing. Markdown has the advantage of looking roughly like what you'd do in plain text and is completely readable in plain text with no processing. It also has the advantage of being nearly standard; it is used on thousands of sites, including some very large ones (e.g. reddit, github, etc.). If I wanted my users to memorize HTML tags I would have just gone with HTML.
This seems to have the negatives of both Markdown and HTML, and no unique advantages over either. It's a little less verbose than HTML, but you have to know HTML tags (and Sundown syntax) to use it, and I have my doubts it can avoid the quirks Markdown has because converting any "friendly" markup to a formal syntax like HTML is always prone to quirks. It has the alleged advantage over Markdown of being able to use HTML and Sundown together...but, some Markdown processors also allow mixing MD and HTML, so this is not a unique benefit (this is quirky in Markdown, but I suspect it's quirky in Sundown, too).
Maybe I'm missing the benefit here, but it seems like a technical solution to a people problem, and that almost never works.
Also, as an aside, it's got the same name as a Markdown processor that is even mentioned in the article! That seems bound to cause confusion, given the similarities in purpose.
- cptaffe 9y agoI also don't think his quams about performance apply to commonmark. It benchmarks quite fast
- SwellJoe 9y agoYeah, I was also confused by using a project that's been unmaintained for several years as the pinnacle of Markdown performance, but I have never once thought about the performance of Markdown parsers (I can imagine someone on the scale of reddit or github would care about performance of the MD parser, but I never have for my projects) so I don't know enough to argue about whether performance has improved since then.
- ne01 9y agoAt SunSed we provide a cloud IDE to our users so they can easily update their website. Every time they make a change the IDE automatically saves the file and on the server we had to compile Markdown -> HTML+SunSed(custom HTML tags) -> Executable. Not to mention bulk website upload, backups and restores (a website could have thousands of pages). Markdown was the slowest part with the most resource usage. I actually bench marked all of the Markdown implementatinos back in 2016 (or early 2017). https://github.com/vmg/sundown https://github.com/vmg/sundown was by far the fastest!
- wsc981 9y agoEither way, is performance really an issue when dealing with Markdown? My uneducated guess is that in 99.99% of cases it's no issue.
- always_good 9y agosure, you don't want it blocking an event loop like the live preview in-browser while you're typing. or a node process.
- pimlottc 9y agoComparing this to markdown just seems completely off the, er, mark. It's more like a simplified version of HTML, which has been done many times before, e.g. https://github.com/padolsey/SIML https://github.com/padolsey/SIML
- kornish 9y agoAgreed. Perhaps perhaps the author should consider, er, marketing this as an alternative to raw HTML rather than to Markdown.
- fiatjaf 9y agoWhy not use Jade?
- Normal_gaussian 9y agoIts called pug now, and you're right, it seems like a reimplementation of jade/pug
- ne01 9y agoGood question. Aside from the difference in syntax (which is huge), I would say convenience. SunSed = Hosting + IDE + CDN + a new programming language + Layout and Template system (like Jekyll and Hugo) + Many built-in tags to abstract things like embedding Youtube videos in a responsive way (which is not easy -- requires so many div wrappers). You can also create your own tags and share it with others. I have started the process of creating tags for useful and popular libraries: https://github.com/sunsed https://github.com/sunsed If you know HTML, you already know the syntax of SunSed programming language, and can create fast dynamic websites with ease by abstracting your website content in custom HTML tags! After all, SunSed is a programmable website builder.
- jitl 9y agoI think when people are saying, “why not use X?” They mean, why not adopt X as your templating language system integrated into SunSed, instead of making your own.
- ne01 9y agoAuthor here. > Maybe I'm missing the benefit here Sundown is useful because it lets you abstract your custom server-side HTML tags. In other words, you can extend the language very easily. For example, you can create a tag called "note" and use that instead of repeating HTLM, CSS and even JS: <s:tag name="note"> <div style="color:red;"> Note: {{@content}}!! </div> </s:tag> And then call your new tag using the HTML syntax or Sundown: <note>Sundown is awesome ;)</note> :note Sundown is awesome :) Result: <div style="color:red">Note: Sundown is awesome :)!!</div> Sundown is just an HTML preprocessor (like Markdown) once it is transformed to HTML it's the SunSed language that compiles all the custom HTML tags to executable format.
- ukulele 9y agoI can see the use case you're going for. As others have mentioned though, this value is not coming as an alternative to markdown but rather an enhancement to HTML in a different use case. Feels kind of like Sundown:HTML::SCSS:CSS. If you can communicate this (vs being an improvement on markdown), you'll probably get people to take a closer look.
- ne01 9y agoYou are right. Thank you for the insight! How about this: Sundown and Markdown are both HTML preprocessors with different goals.
- roywiggins 9y agoNot all markdown processors implement inline HTML, which I learned to my detriment recently (the "markdown" package on npm doesn't).
- ne01 9y agoExactly. Most Markdown processors don't implement this feature because it is very unpredictable and has too many contradictory edge cases.