4 ms·
Markdown was engineered to be flexible _on purpose_ because it was designed for writers and readers, not programmers. Writers are less likely to care about wha
by splatcollision 6y ago
Markdown was engineered to be flexible _on purpose_ because it was designed for writers and readers, not programmers.
Writers are less likely to care about what symbol means "bulleted list item", as long as anything that makes sense for it, just works.
It's a mistake to think of Markdown as a programming language, or a "formal grammar".
That being said, if it works for you go for it...
- gritzko 6y agoI have my agenda https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25961188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25961188
- legulere 6y agolists are one of markdown's weak points though with numbered lists completely ignoring the numbers
- admax88q 6y agoThats optimized for never having to renumber yoir lists as you edit your document. I would hate to have to change 30 numbers because i want to move an item from last to first.
- hyperpape 6y agoOptimizing for readers definitely excludes lists like: 2. 3. 5. 6. 1.
- setr 6y agoTbf it’d be trivial to have a button/flag to fix it in the source, and a warning to notify the user. It’d might be debatable to do so automatically, but on demand there’s no issue (like words table of content update/warning). But the current definition of “its always sequential, that’s it” means you could do it automatically without changing meaning. Whereas do-as-I-say is stuck with being unsafe, always
- gerikson 6y agoThis is the same as HTML's <ol> though...
- ufo 6y agoOne downside of markdown being so flexible is that it's hard to remember if a given dialect implements a certain feature, or how it will handle a certain corner case I think I see the appeal of specifying a robust subset of markdown, something that you can trust will probably be parsed the same way for as many dialects as possible.
- FriedrichN 6y agoI totally agree with this. It's quite annoying you never quite know what dialect some website is using, they never mention, because it seems very few of these dialects have names. What also annoys me is that they didn't base it off Wiki formatting. It would've been great if it had at least some compatibility for basic stuff like headings and links.
- nine_k 6y agoIf you want to render Markdown in a way other than plain text, you need formal rules of parsing it. No matter how informal you want Markdown to be, if you want e.g. a nicely rendered Readme on Githiub, you have to follow the formal rules.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]