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The Story Behind Markdown
- dabeeeenster 6y agoThe capture of cmd+f on that page is truly terrible. Why do people do this?
- Mamady 6y agoThe goal is to make it easier for users to perform a site-wide "find". You can easily disable it by using the checkbox on the bottom right of the overlay that appears; then cmd+f will behave similar to your browser's setup.
- POiNTx 6y agoFew people want to do a site wide search and the ones who do will press the input box on the top left. No one expects that ctrl-f will open a site wide search, everyone expects a page search. If you still want to enable this ctrl-f to enable the site wide search, I suggest making it opt in with the checkbox. It's really obnoxious to have to disable the checkbox.
- awwstn 6y agoAgree that for new traffic like HN, and maybe on our essays generally, it's a bit jarring. We'll tweak these settings a bit. This search interface has been a huge hit with our regular users, but it's harder to get feedback from fly-by traffic, so this is really helpful.
- the_af 6y agoIf regular users find it helpful, maybe advertise this as an opt-in feature? To be honest, the non-standard behaviour plus strange looking popup confused me. I didn't even notice the tiny checkbox, nor that you could press CTRL+F again to get the standard search behaviour. My mistake, of course, but this speaks of poor UX in my opinion...
- awwstn 6y agoFWIW, we got the idea from Stripe's API docs[1]. Not that Stripe is above reproach, but they sure are good at this stuff. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api
- degenerate 6y agoPlease don't override default keyboard shortcuts. The sitewide search is a nice tool, but if I wanted to do that I would search on your site. Novice and advanced users want CTRL+F to behave as they are expecting, not bring up an unfamiliar (and unrelated) tool. For example Google Sheets also hijacks CTRL+F but at least it replaces it with something that operates extremely similar to the original action.
- oftenwrong 6y agoWhy should a browser allow its own shortcuts to be overridden at all? At the very least, some form of warning or permission-granting should be involved.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThey're permitted to be overridden so that we can make web applications. It makes sense for sites like Google Docs or Sheets to override many of the defaults as, once loaded, it's replacing a desktop application and the common access patterns of it. It's less applicable (and very annoying) on sites meant for presentation or consumption of information.
- wtetzner 6y agoBut users should be able to override and specify that certain shortcuts can’t be hijacked.
- Jtsummers 6y agoThat I would agree with 100%. It'd be nice to have a panel of all the shortcuts and their present meaning available, with the option to rebind them or remove site-local bindings. The user could get the option to prevent (by default) changes to bindings, with the option to permit them on a site-by-site (or even page-by-page) basis; or to allow them by default and then deny them on a site-by-site basis.
- 6y ago
- ochoseis 6y agoA common hotkey for a site’s search box is “/“, vim-style.
- jandrese 6y agoThe problem is that our fancy new infinite scrolling pages break ctrl-f in browsers, as they cycle content in and out based on the viewport or collapse threads by actually removing the content from the page. The downside is that the site's built-in search feature is always worse than ctrl-f at finding something on the page. Always. It shouldn't even be hard, but they're always returning garbage like 8 year old posts on completely unrelated articles instead of the stuff on the page you're currently viewing, and advanced mode is usually broken in weird and confusing ways. It seems like web designers are optimizing for the thing you never do.
- macintux 6y agoYou have to look at it closely enough to discover that, which is difficult when you're actively angry at the site. I just switched to reader mode and used Command-F there instead.
- fastball 6y agoPress it again and you get normal page search?
- the_af 6y agoIt never would have occurred to me if I hadn't read your comment. So... poor UX?
- fastball 6y agoIt's more a UI problem, not having a tip telling the user you can do that. Stripe's API reference[1] was one of the first to do this, and I really enjoy it. In their popup modal thing they tell you to press CMD/CTRL+F again if you want to browser native find functionality. [1] https://stripe.com/docs/api https://stripe.com/docs/api
- the_af 6y agoIt's uncommon enough that none of the ton of websites I visit (a healthy mix of tech, gaming, hobby, news and other sites) employ this trick. Call it what you will, UX or UI: it's still poor, as in "nonstandard" and "confusing".
- fastball 6y agoRight, my point is just that non-standard UX does not need to be confusing if you properly explain what is happening to your users. Every standard interaction started out non-standard, after all.
- spurgu 6y agoAgreed. As long as you point it out it's fair to me (even if I don't personally happen to like it).
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y agoI closed the tab when ctrl-f produced a popover. I thought it was an ad.
- NelsonMinar 6y agoIt doesn't even work! Ctrl-F "commonmark" shows zero results, even though the text is in the article. Pressing Ctrl-F twice to get the actual browser search does let you find it, but some fuckery has broken the scrolling to the result so you still can't find it easily.
- jawngee 6y agoIt's Charles Schulz, not Charles Swartz.
- sbierwagen 6y agoThis article mentions CommonMark, and skips lightly over the fact that it was hastily renamed that from Standard Markdown after Gruber threw an enormous hissy fit over users improving something he hadn't touched for twelve years: https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...
- leephillips 6y agoThat’s pretty funny, considering Gruber’s attitude toward other people’s intellectual property: https://lee-phillips.org/music/whoIsTheDick/ https://lee-phillips.org/music/whoIsTheDick/
- tobr 6y agoI read that and thought to myself, “The only thing this Lee Phillips person is managing to convince me of is that Lee Phillips is a dick”. Then I came back here and realized that’s you. I guess I’m the dick now.
- leephillips 6y agoYou lost me.
- zorpner 6y agoIt's quite the essay, defending a man who purchased a house for a low price and made a piece of art decades ago, and continues to extract value from both without making any additional meaningful contributions as regards either. It's almost... like he's seeking... rent. I wonder if there's an economic term for this behavior or any theory about whether or not it should be rewarded.
- mietek 6y agoPeppered with Amazon referral links, too.
- tpmx 6y agoI had no idea Aaron Swartz was the originator of the principal design decisions behind Markdown: http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/atx/intro I had always thought that Gruber was the guy who created it. This makes so much more sense. I couldn't make sense of it - it always felt like someone else with a different kind of capability had created it. If you google "markdown" it says "Developed by: John Gruber (in collaboration with Aaron Swartz on the syntax)" This now seems like a gross misrepresentation.
- saagarjha 6y agoPlease be nice.
- tpmx 6y agoPlease be factual.
- saagarjha 6y agoThe facts are that personal attacks are not tolerated here. My comment was simply a reminder that you should already know this.
- tpmx 6y agoYou're right. I edited the comment to make it less inoffensive to Apple fans. We should really protect these people. Apple fans truly are one of the most oppressed peoples nowadays.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoAll right, let me offer a different phrasing: Aaron Swartz created atx, and John Gruber created Markdown. The syntax between the two is similar, but not identical, as can be said for several other "plain text markup" formats that are, you know, not Markdown. (Like Textile, which was also not created by Aaron Swartz.) Not insignificantly, the original Perl script that implements Markdown was John Gruber's. It functions as a plugin for the Perl-based Movable Type blog engine because that's what Daring Fireball uses. Swartz wrote atx, by contrast, in his preferred programming language of Python. So, to be factual: John Gruber created Markdown.
- cma 6y agoWhy do websites like this capture ctrl-f and make it not search the page?
- jandrese 6y agoAm I the only person that gets annoyed that every single site wants to implement their own special and incompatible subset of markdown? Yes, I'm looking at you HackerNews, who makes it hard to block quote.
- spiffytech 6y agoHN doesn't even attempt to support Markdown. It's just happenstance that a couple of formatting options are similar. HN's doc on formatting: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc But on other sites, yes, it's very irritating that I can't count on support for things like tables or checkboxes because those are extensions to Markdown and not part of CommonMark or the original reference everyone implemented from. Or how some sites get finnicky about whitespace around list items.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago> HN doesn't even attempt to support Markdown. It's just happenstance that a couple of formatting options are similar. In particular, for a website that heavily covers software and engineering, it's a pain that it doesn't have a good way to format code. ``` this should be formatted as four lines of code with line breaks at every newline without having to indent every line with spaces ```
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- the_af 6y agoI wonder why this is. Is it because there aren't enough HN users who would actually use markdown formatting (I know I would!), because it's too much work to implement, because "if it ain't broke...", or for any other reason?
- geerlingguy 6y agoThe one and only reason I feel like that's not _such_ a bad thing is that once you do that, you know more people will drop tons of code samples in posts making the discussion a lot less easy to browse.
- jchook 6y agoThe article seems to gloss over the enormous contribution CommonMark made to ensuring a consistent and versatile interpretation of markdown, mostly by examining edge cases no one thinks about until they appear in the wild.
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here: Goal here was to focus more on what led to Markdown itself, with a bit of details around how other takes (MultiMarkdown, CommonMark, GitHub Flavored Markdown) took it further, in the same way that Markdown in some ways took ideas from earlier formats further or honed them down to fit what Markdown was aimed at. There's definitely space to dig into the whole family of plain text syntax both before and after Markdown (including things like Org-mode, C2's wiki markup, Pandoc, Todo.txt, and more that were mentioned elsewhere in this discussion).
- bonaldi 6y agoI've always found it strange that such a strong Mac advocate as Gruber was behind Markdown. After all, the Mac was doing real rich text in 1984, and with just one more push in the early browser days we might have got there for the web too. Instead we're left with this inconsistent mess — hell, even Gruber gets his own link syntax wrong from time to time - because good enough was the enemy of better.
- leephillips 6y agoWhat do you consider “better” here: having to use the mouse to click on menus to make something italic? Or do I misunderstand.
- bonaldi 6y agoRich text editing doesn’t demand a mouse: it’s the same number of keystrokes to press cmd-b as it is to do shift-8. But if the intended output is rich text, then wysiwyg is a better interface for editing, yes. Not everything needs to degrade to a teletype.
- leephillips 6y agoBut it’s more than just hitting cmd-b, isn’t it? Doesn’t the text that you want to be bold need to be selected first?
- bonaldi 6y agoNot usually, no. But applying formatting on top of selection is another rich text benefit: with text selected cmd-B makes it bold, shift-8 just replaces the selection with an asterisk (in a standard text field)
- sooheon 6y agocmd-B does nothing in a standard text field. If you mean text fields with code to handle keyboard shortcuts, you can just as easily have cmd-B surround text in asterisks as trigger wysiwyg bold formatting.
- DonaldFisk 6y agoSimplified markup of text was standard on wikis, beginning with Ward's Wiki at c2.com in 1994, a full ten years before Markdown appeared.
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here: Ohhh that's one I wish I hadn't missed, thanks for mentioning it. Ward's contributions with c2 keep showing up in different places, as you mention here with plain text formatting, and in other ways with for example the backlinking that's popular now in Roam Research, Notion, and every other personal notes app that suddenly is making the personal wiki a reality.
- neurocline 6y agoNot to mention Setext, 1991.
- maguay 6y agoOh man, a standardized plain-text email formatting! I can't believe I hadn't come across that before. I just added a brief mention of that to the article with a credit to your comment; that's absolutely something worth including.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- macintux 6y agoNo mention of org-mode, which is a shame, and of course the hijacking of F is maddening.
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here: Org-mode would have been another good one to cover, thanks for mentioning that. It was started right in the middle—Textile came in 2002, Org-mode in 2003, Markdown in 2004. Makes me think of Todo.txt also, which came a couple years later. There might be space here to dig into the whole family tree of plain text formatting syntax. Appreciate everyone's feedback on the the search pane. I think it feels better in other parts of our app where you can use it as a command palette of sorts to navigate, but you're right, it makes it hard to search inside longer blog posts like this. You can press CMD+F twice in a row to get browser search, but that's definitely a bit of extra trouble. We'll have to work on this!
- macintux 6y agoAs someone else pointed out, the discoverability of CMD-F twice in a row is nil, and frankly it annoyed me so much I wouldn't notice any instructions that were in the pane unless they were right at the top in big, apologetic letters.
- maguay 6y agoFair enough—definitely something we need to reconsider. Appreciate the feedback!
- leephillips 6y agoAdvice to the author: This is a subject I am interested in, so I began your article eagerly, but had to stop about halfway through out of frustration. Please consider these as the constructive suggestions that I intend them to be: Think about the story you want to tell. Maybe make an outline or diagram, marking at which points you will introduce which facts. Example: For some reason something called Commonmark is abruptly mentioned, with a link to spec documents that would seem to be of only technical interest. What is this, and how is it connected to anything else? Do enough research so that you know the highest peaks in the landscape. Why describe the foothills and take no notice of the prominent mountaintop right in front of us? Example: the bits about the comics were fascinating. But where is Pandoc? I don’t think I’m guilty, here, of demanding that you write the article I would have written. But Pandoc is the application of Markdown. It turns Markdown into a way to author HTML, TeX, PDF, Office formats, and a lot more. It‘s huge. Anyway, I like the look of your site (but agree with others that you should not hijack browser shortcuts).
- gen220 6y agoI feel like pandoc is kind of like a secret club. Once you know about pandoc, you orient all of your prose around it, because it's so powerful and useful. But before you use it, the common opinion is "oh that sounds nice", not "oh let me build all of my workflows around it". It is incredible how far markdown, sed and pandoc (with filters) can take you! I've made websites with breadcrumbs, validated inter-document links and images, on and on; mostly pipelines with sed and pandoc. All of my non-source-code homework in college went through pandoc, and was persisted as markdown source. It makes for clean diffs, and great version history. Anyway. Give pandoc a try if you haven't already.
- leephillips 6y agoI’m with you. And it’s true that’s it’s hard to take account of your own perspective. It’s possible to write a kind of story of Markdown and not make Pandoc a big part of it. But it seems like a glaring omission to not even mention it. It‘s what makes Markdown a real lingua franca, what gives it real power.
- 6y ago
- darkstarsys 6y agoDoesn't mention org, rst, or any of the other simplified ASCII markup mini-languages. Missed opportunity.
- xenocyon 6y agoI was introduced to markdown via RStudio. But what I really use the most nowadays is markdown for making notes during meetings etc, using a minimalist editor (Typora). I just wish it weren't so complicated/ugly to copy/paste markdown to/from other tools, like Outlook or Confluence. I use only the basic and common syntactic elements (lists, headings, italics, links). IMHO the beauty of markdown is its simplicity, and trying to do complicated stuff like diagrams and tables is best left to other tools. (Another problem with the more ambitious uses is that they tend to not be standardized across markdown implementations.)
- maguay 6y agoAuthor here: Agreed on it being better to do advanced stuff in other apps. I found it interesting that the original Markdown launch posts basically say that. Textile was trying to cover the vast majority of HTML; Gruber with Markdown basically said that this is to simplify writing for the web, and if you need HTML, you can just include HTML inline for extra stuff beyond the writing basics.
- jgilias 6y agoJust one of the great things Aaron Schwartz was involved in. So sad we lost him so young. I really do believe the Internet would somehow be a different place now if he was still around.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]