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I don't understand how you can say that. Markdown is massively more complicated than the equivalent HTML. HTML syntax is simple: Every gizmo is expressed as a

I don't understand how you can say that. Markdown is massively more complicated than the equivalent HTML. HTML syntax is simple: Every gizmo is expressed as a <tag> and optionally an end </tag>, there are escapes for <, > and &, and that's all that ever needs escaping. Markdown, on the other hand, has a syntax that is ever expanding. It's all exceptions to exceptions to exceptions (exceptions all the way down). For example, what happens if in a markdown document talking about regular expressions you have this text: [^A-Za-z]. Will it be interpreted as a footnote? Or is it an exception? Who knows, only trial and error will tell.

kyleee 5y ago
And it may be handled differently between the many "flavors" of markdown! In my experience, with decent editor assistance to help with boilerplate, closing html tags, etx. I enjoy writing simple docs more in html
brundolf 5y ago
You're talking about parsing/syntax, but what matters here is semantics. (Normal) Markdown maps to a small subset of all possible HTML tags, most of them on the simpler end of things, and that makes its overall scope and semantics simpler than those of HTML, even if its syntax is not.
- munch117 5y ago
  Means and ends. If your means are complex, but the ends you are achieving are simple, then you're not getting good value for money. If I am to abide complex syntax then I'd better get sophisticated, powerful semantics in return. HTML 1.0 (no CSS, no JS, no floats) is very similar in scope to Markdown. I wish every site that uses Markdown would allow me to write something like HTML 1.0 instead. It would be so much easier, at least for me.
  - eevilspock 5y ago
    The whole point of machines is to do tedious or hard work so people don't have to.
- kelnos 5y ago
  I don't think it's really about parsing/syntax. Or, rather, it is, but that has implications not just for the person writing a markdown parser or renderer, but for the person writing documents in markdown as well. With HTML, I know that anything inside angle brackets won't get shown, because that's a directive to the rendering engine to do something. Put another way, only <, >, and I guess & are special and need to be escaped if I want to use them. Everything else will show up as I've typed it. With markdown, a future feature addition could actually change the layout or structure of an existing document, because arbitrary characters (and sequences of characters) mean particular things. Previously, [^1] was a hyperlink to somewhere else (assuming I put "[^1]: https://wherever.com https://wherever.com" somewhere else on the page). Now it's a link to that "[^1]: https://whatever.com https://whatever.com" text on the same page. This change may have broken existing documents.
k_sze 5y ago
Keep in mind that it’s not all about simplicity. One of the selling points of MarkDown is that it’s legible even when left in its plain text source format. HTML is ugly when left in its source format.
- cxr 5y ago
  I'd wager that GitHub is one of the biggest publishers of larger-than-bite-sized Markdown documents, and this "selling point" (an argument which I both agree with about [original] Markdown and agree that this is a good property) is pretty much untrue for any given piece you'll find on GitHub. This is thanks to several factors including "GitHub-Flavored Markdown" differing so wildly from the original flavor, and the typical GitHub user just not giving a shit about how the raw form looks—treating it as just another non-WYSIWYG formatting language in the vein of HTML or TeX, since all they're really after most of the time is for their README to work as a substitute for a product landing page.

kyleee 5y ago

And it may be handled differently between the many "flavors" of markdown! In my experience, with decent editor assistance to help with boilerplate, closing html tags, etx. I enjoy writing simple docs more in html

brundolf 5y ago

You're talking about parsing/syntax, but what matters here is semantics. (Normal) Markdown maps to a small subset of all possible HTML tags, most of them on the simpler end of things, and that makes its overall scope and semantics simpler than those of HTML, even if its syntax is not.

munch117 5y ago
Means and ends. If your means are complex, but the ends you are achieving are simple, then you're not getting good value for money. If I am to abide complex syntax then I'd better get sophisticated, powerful semantics in return. HTML 1.0 (no CSS, no JS, no floats) is very similar in scope to Markdown. I wish every site that uses Markdown would allow me to write something like HTML 1.0 instead. It would be so much easier, at least for me.
- eevilspock 5y ago
  The whole point of machines is to do tedious or hard work so people don't have to.
kelnos 5y ago
I don't think it's really about parsing/syntax. Or, rather, it is, but that has implications not just for the person writing a markdown parser or renderer, but for the person writing documents in markdown as well. With HTML, I know that anything inside angle brackets won't get shown, because that's a directive to the rendering engine to do something. Put another way, only <, >, and I guess & are special and need to be escaped if I want to use them. Everything else will show up as I've typed it. With markdown, a future feature addition could actually change the layout or structure of an existing document, because arbitrary characters (and sequences of characters) mean particular things. Previously, [^1] was a hyperlink to somewhere else (assuming I put "[^1]: https://wherever.com https://wherever.com" somewhere else on the page). Now it's a link to that "[^1]: https://whatever.com https://whatever.com" text on the same page. This change may have broken existing documents.

k_sze 5y ago

Keep in mind that it’s not all about simplicity. One of the selling points of MarkDown is that it’s legible even when left in its plain text source format. HTML is ugly when left in its source format.

cxr 5y ago
I'd wager that GitHub is one of the biggest publishers of larger-than-bite-sized Markdown documents, and this "selling point" (an argument which I both agree with about [original] Markdown and agree that this is a good property) is pretty much untrue for any given piece you'll find on GitHub. This is thanks to several factors including "GitHub-Flavored Markdown" differing so wildly from the original flavor, and the typical GitHub user just not giving a shit about how the raw form looks—treating it as just another non-WYSIWYG formatting language in the vein of HTML or TeX, since all they're really after most of the time is for their README to work as a substitute for a product landing page.