4 ms·
The author here. Yeah, I'm well aware that markdown didn't happen in a vacuum and was inspired by plain text formatting conventions. But there is only that muc
by kmelve 5y ago
The author here.
Yeah, I'm well aware that markdown didn't happen in a vacuum and was inspired by plain text formatting conventions. But there is only that much you can cover in an already too long blog post. It wouldn't have changed my argument much either. It wouldn't be historically accurate to say that Markdown existed before Gruber/Swartz, like it wouldn't be accurate to say that HTML existed before Tim-Berners Lee, even though SGML and such was a thing.
I'm not arguing for a more proprietary binary word processor format either. Or that we should type JSON. It's actually possible to have decent WYSIWYG editors that does their job. And they won't get better if don't put our minds to them.
The point you're missing in this reply is the legitime user-unfriendly experience of markdown and the challenges it poses for developers who are trying to solve things for their teams and customers today.
- Falkon1313 5y agoI'll admit that a lot of users don't like it. And maybe someday there will be a WYSIWYG editor that lives up to the name. But after about 30 years of dealing with ones that don't, I might be a little jaded. Plain text conventions like Markdown may not be fancy, but they do at least work.