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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

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.

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.