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I'm sorry, I may be in the minority here but I strongly dislike this. Where I type no additional characters to start a paragraph in markdown, I'll need to type
by jnsie 6y ago
I'm sorry, I may be in the minority here but I strongly dislike this. Where I type no additional characters to start a paragraph in markdown, I'll need to type 9 characters with dumb down? Same goes for titles, subtitles, etc.? While I appreciate people trying to fix problems, I don't find the core symbols required for markdown that esoteric and for anything else I'm certain I'll have as much difficulty remembering the correct dumbdown as I would remembering the equivalent markdown.
- nattaylor 6y ago"Keywords instead of key characters" is a feature to the author.
- clan 6y agoAhem. English keywords is a feature... While I like the abstraction of using English when programming I would like to keep it out of my text. Yes. You could translate. But...
- hinkley 6y agoI wonder how long we go down this road before we wrap back around to using ASCII/Unicode punctuation to mark up text (eg, paragraph and section symbols) If memory serves, early 90's era document editors might not have used them in their file formats, but did have a display mode that used them (so you could figure out why that word keeps being bold after you've told it five times to cut it out)
- s17n 6y agoI think most people will prefer markdown, since this breaks the ability to read the doc as plain text. However for people that don't care about that, dumbdown might be nice.
- onlyrealcuzzo 6y agoThe whole point of Markdown is that the formatting is simple and keeps the text readable - even enhances readability over plain text with no formatting. Dumbdown is more keystrokes and the formatting gets in the way of readability. I try to be positive in all Show HN posts - but I'm having trouble finding something good to say about this.
- hinkley 6y agoAt least it doesn't assume inline HTML. Inline HTML is great for internal usage and pure peer relationships. It's a nonstarter when you're in a situation where you have contributions who are only partially invested or only pretending to be. In a work environment, the threat of ostracism has many more teeth and they are far sharper. Upload spyware or exploits, lose your job. The Elixir Markdown implementation doesn't even have an option to turn it off :/
- utopcell 6y agoYou are not in the minority. This repo is borderline trolling.
- gu5 6y agoMarkdown is better for many people that want quick formatting even if you have to remember the syntax. Dumbdown is for people that want easy formatting, even if it takes more keystrokes.
- SemiNormal 6y agoThey can just use a word processor then. I am not really seeing the target audience for this.
- markstos 6y agoEasy? Markdown was based on people already using "" for bulleted lists, /slashes/ for italics and bold* in plaintext email. People were writing valid Markdown before it was invented. It doesn't easier than that. No one ever has intuitively written Dumbdown.
- lucideer 6y agoGiven the title, I suspect this was the intent. Personally I really dislike Markdown, and this project does what I thought was impossible: it not only removes any & all advantages Markdown has over markup (brevity, human-readability), but it also somehow manages to make the bad things about Markdown (complex parsing, bad spec.) even worse again. Which is a truly impressive feat tbh. Full marks for ingenuity.
- dev_tty01 6y ago"Do you want a markup language that doesn't require memorizing esoteric symbols but uses words instead?" In a word, no. Esoteric seems a stretch as a characterization of Markdown.