5 ms·

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good. Then "modern content creators" did not "want to

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good. Then "modern content creators" did not "want to learn syntax", created "tools that edited and rendered HTML differently and inconsistently", added hundreds of unnecessary tags in it, then started to get smart about "semantic information" and introduced HTML-5-style tags like <article>, which too few people use... Techies felt that all to be unworkable and did a new thing. They remembered text files being good, and started to call a very minimal syntax "Markdown", with a common core large enough to be almost universally understood. And now we have this article again, which reads a lot like it was about HTML, ca. 1995.

smugglerFlynn 5y ago
I, for one, welcome our new semantic overlords
WalterBright 5y ago
In the beginning, was runoff. At least runoff was around on DEC machines in 1975. I wrote a couple term papers with it, Markdown is hardly different.
- unfocussed_mike 5y ago
  I once typeset an Occam assignment paper in groff, for kicks.
red_trumpet 5y ago
> Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. HTML5 was introduced in 2008, whereas Markdown was published in 2004.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jeltz 5y ago
The ideas behind Markdown are much older than HTML5 and all those tags you talk about. Wikipedia with its MediaWiki syntax is from 2001, ReStructuredText is from 2002, Markdown from 2004, HTML5 from 2008. And I am sure you can find way older formats which Wikipedia and ReST used as inspiration.
- webmaven 5y ago
  You missed ASCIIDoc[0] (2002) from your chosen timeframe, but also some much older Lightweight Markup Languages[1] like setext[2] from 1992. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext
atoav 5y ago
As someone who regularily writes HTML manually, there are distinct advantages of markdown over html: * The most common use case (paragraphs of text) needs no boilerplate or magical syntax * A typical Readme can still be easily read and understood without markdown rendering (e.g. a # Heading is still understood as a Heading, and a _emphasized_ text is still understood as being emphasized, even by the uninitiated. * Writing markdown can be faster than both HTML or a WYSIWYG-editor, because the syntax is minimal HTML is certainly more powerful, but sometimes you just want to chug out some text quickly and this is where markdown (IMO) shines
tannhaeuser 5y ago
Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it ;) In the beginning, there were tens of text processors with rich text encoding syntaxes (troff, TeX, IBM pre-GML, DEC stuff, WordPerfect, etc.) Then came SGML with customizable meta syntax and vocabulary to unify those. A large part of HTML is actually contained in ISO 8879, as "folklore" elements <p>, <h1>-<h2>, and so on. Then came HTML as an SGML application, and later XML as an SGML subset. Then people forgot the aspects of SGML not in XML, and invented ad-hoc syntax such as Markdown and MediaWiki syntax (both of which can be partly represented as SGML SHORTREF syntax), and Ian Hickson (WHATWG) started to specify HTML parsing rules in an informal ad-hoc way, based on the tag omission/inference rules of W3C's HTML4, and what was called "real-world" HTML (nevertheless also inventing new elements <main>, <article>, <aside>). Then, due to presentation as prose and mere enumeration of element names, the basic construction of HTML as a formal DTD grammar was lost, and WHATWG added elements and rules nilly-willy, without being informed by a DTD grammar or other formal mechanism to ensure parse-ability.
eadmund 5y ago
> In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good. No, it's really not. It is excessively verbose for human usage, and too loose for computer usage. It's a hack. For human usage, Markdown is pretty decent. For computer usage, an S-expression–based HTML would have been preferable: (html (head (title "Hello world!") (meta ((http-equiv content-type) (content text/html) (charset utf-8)))) (body ((bgcolor white)) (h1 "Hello world!") (p "This is my first webpage.")))

smugglerFlynn 5y ago

I, for one, welcome our new semantic overlords

WalterBright 5y ago

In the beginning, was runoff. At least runoff was around on DEC machines in 1975. I wrote a couple term papers with it, Markdown is hardly different.

unfocussed_mike 5y ago
I once typeset an Occam assignment paper in groff, for kicks.

red_trumpet 5y ago

> Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it. HTML5 was introduced in 2008, whereas Markdown was published in 2004.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jeltz 5y ago

The ideas behind Markdown are much older than HTML5 and all those tags you talk about. Wikipedia with its MediaWiki syntax is from 2001, ReStructuredText is from 2002, Markdown from 2004, HTML5 from 2008. And I am sure you can find way older formats which Wikipedia and ReST used as inspiration.

webmaven 5y ago
You missed ASCIIDoc[0] (2002) from your chosen timeframe, but also some much older Lightweight Markup Languages[1] like setext[2] from 1992. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AsciiDoc [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setext

atoav 5y ago

As someone who regularily writes HTML manually, there are distinct advantages of markdown over html: * The most common use case (paragraphs of text) needs no boilerplate or magical syntax * A typical Readme can still be easily read and understood without markdown rendering (e.g. a # Heading is still understood as a Heading, and a _emphasized_ text is still understood as being emphasized, even by the uninitiated. * Writing markdown can be faster than both HTML or a WYSIWYG-editor, because the syntax is minimal HTML is certainly more powerful, but sometimes you just want to chug out some text quickly and this is where markdown (IMO) shines

tannhaeuser 5y ago

Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it ;) In the beginning, there were tens of text processors with rich text encoding syntaxes (troff, TeX, IBM pre-GML, DEC stuff, WordPerfect, etc.) Then came SGML with customizable meta syntax and vocabulary to unify those. A large part of HTML is actually contained in ISO 8879, as "folklore" elements <p>, <h1>-<h2>, and so on. Then came HTML as an SGML application, and later XML as an SGML subset. Then people forgot the aspects of SGML not in XML, and invented ad-hoc syntax such as Markdown and MediaWiki syntax (both of which can be partly represented as SGML SHORTREF syntax), and Ian Hickson (WHATWG) started to specify HTML parsing rules in an informal ad-hoc way, based on the tag omission/inference rules of W3C's HTML4, and what was called "real-world" HTML (nevertheless also inventing new elements <main>, <article>, <aside>). Then, due to presentation as prose and mere enumeration of element names, the basic construction of HTML as a formal DTD grammar was lost, and WHATWG added elements and rules nilly-willy, without being informed by a DTD grammar or other formal mechanism to ensure parse-ability.

eadmund 5y ago

> In the beginning, there was HTML, and it was good. No, it's really not. It is excessively verbose for human usage, and too loose for computer usage. It's a hack. For human usage, Markdown is pretty decent. For computer usage, an S-expression–based HTML would have been preferable: (html (head (title "Hello world!") (meta ((http-equiv content-type) (content text/html) (charset utf-8)))) (body ((bgcolor white)) (h1 "Hello world!") (p "This is my first webpage.")))