15 ms·

Why Is Markdown Popular?

107 points by rcarmo 4y ago

xigoi 4y ago
I actually love using plain text to create documents, but I'm also bothered by the irregularity and non-extensibility of Markdown, which is why I created xidoc: https://xidoc.nim.town/ https://xidoc.nim.town/
- I_complete_me 4y ago
  Let me commend you on this effort. I would definitely consider using it in a situation where markdown did not suffice. It does require nim and nimble to be installed but that doesn't bother me.
  - xigoi 4y ago
    At least the installation is easy, unlike many projects written is other languages where you need to manually install a billion dependencies and edit some obscure configuration files :)
martyalain 4y ago
Hi, It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. » The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ What do you think of this answer?
- nikodotio 4y ago
  (:b (:i “we love hiccup”))
  - martyalain 4y ago
    {p {b hi nkodotio} Could you tell us more about {i hicupp}?}
endtime 4y ago
> Blockquotes. Are people really typing > before each paragraph? No, they’re using an editor. Yes they are, and no they aren't, respectively.
gerikson 4y ago
Markdown is the worst way to write HTML except for all the rest.
- donquichotte 4y ago
  You had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie.
  - janfoeh 4y ago
    Thank you for not lying; it is appreciated.
- frizlab 4y ago
  Asciidoc is much better IMHO
  - matijsvzuijlen 4y ago
    Asciidoc starts out great but has a lot of surprising gotchas and complexities.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I dislike Markdown, but I can't help finding Asciidoc annoying. There's got to be an "Asciidoc: The Good Parts" waiting to be written.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> Markdown will never get beyond developers. In my experience it works pretty well for non-developers. I added it to our email client years ago as an alternative to the WYSIWYG editor, and quite a few non-developers liked and used it. Also see Reddit, which uses it. While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there. As for the larger point: do I have a great love of Markdown? Not really; I think some of the other similar formats are better. But it works "well enough", and switching syntaxes is hard so I "just use Markdown" . I hate the "GitHub flavoured Markdown" with a passion though; the way it deals with newlines is just fundamentally broken and it's inconsistent even on GitHub where some things are GFM and some things are not (which they need to be, because GFM is fundamentally broken) leading to sillyness like copy/pasting text from one part of GitHub to another part ending up with badly formatted text. Either way, whatever the faults of Markdown may be, I sure as hell prefer it over any HTML subset. Writing <i>emphasis</i> is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; there's few things I dislike more than having to focus on the presentation as I'm writing something.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  In every company there will be a few who just can't grasp Markdown, but they can't grasp any markup language, and struggle in WYSIWYG editors (like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Google Docs) too (usually not grasping the concept of the document outline created by applying header styles correctly). The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technological silver bullet to solve it. Newlines in Markdown are pretty weirdly implemented, certainly! The canonical markup seems to be to make paragraphs by having two newlines (which all tools do), and to have an actual newline within a paragraph by ending the preceding sentence with two spaces and a newline. I'd love it if all tools did that, but an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    It's always going to be hard to settle on a solution that works for everyone; I also struggle with things like Google Docs. But if people struggle with Markdown and word processors ... yeah, I don't know what else can be done. > an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline. Yeah, I don't expect the current situation to be resolved any time soon.
stevage 4y ago
The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects). The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way to store formatted text without the horrors of full blown HTML. You can stick some markdown in a CMS database, render it on a webpage, and get the most common formatting: links, bullet points, bold. Great. On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2. But mixed in there, the author seems to have some weird assumptions that people are using Markdown primarily to write documentation, and this is somehow Markdown's fault. I genuinely don't understand this, or their point 13 "It’s 2022, we shouldn’t be using ascii-text to write documents." Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.
- Freak_NL 4y ago
  For their major gripe that point 13 is a pretty weak one. Text editors can present a Markdown document any way you want, and even a WYSIWYG editor is possible if you like that. Besides, Markdown fully supports alternate character encodings, not just ASCII (that would make Markdown really obsolete). Most people surely use UTF-8 for Markdown documents.
- azangru 4y ago
  > the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) Isn't it markup?
  - jeltz 4y ago
    No, it is specifically markup which tries to be nice to read even unrendered. Reading HTML source code is rarely nice and that is also a form of markup language.
The_Colonel 4y ago
I like Markdown for self-contained one page documents with basic formatting - reddit comments, README.md etc. For anything more it's just inadequate.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  And on other hand tools suitable for more complex things are probably too much for one page documents. So it is really choosing right tool for right job.
- themadturk 4y ago
  I wrote a 98,000+ word novel in Markdown. Pandoc renders it perfectly to Word. The text included a title page, epigraphs in italic, headers of various levels for parts, chapters, scenes. All I had to do in Word was make sure my paragraph styles were set up the way I wanted (and that Pandoc knew what they were supposed to look like), then run a macro to get rid of the cr/lfs between paragraphs. I don't know if the novel was any good, but it looked good. Markdown was certainly adequate.
  - The_Colonel 4y ago
    What I had more in mind was e.g. linking between different documents, images, tables, footnotes etc. I guess most of these are possible (depending on your Markdown flavor), but largely very awkward.
azangru 4y ago
> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Not only is this probably incorrect; but even if it were the case, then: - so what? - doesn't this contradict the title lamenting the popularity of markdown?
- halfbrite 4y ago
  You are right. Case and point; Discord - bringing basic markdown to the masses.
  - evgen 4y ago
    Slack and Discord have probably made more people into casual Markdown users who do not even know that they are using Markdown. When I told my wife Obsidian lets her keep notes using Markdown she was not convinced, once she tried her response was 'oh, it is just like one big Slack message window'.
nwellnhof 4y ago
While I agree with many of the points, the proposal that we need a a new standard based on HTML is a bit weird. I guess the author hasn't read the HTML5 spec which is a total monstrosity and suffers from problems similar to Markdown. If you want a document format where essentially every document is valid, you have to specify each and every corner case which gets messy very quickly. Just look at the HTML5 spec. To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec. CommonMark comes closest, but it's still a mostly informal spec often based on examples. In my opinion, the best option is still XML, or better yet some slimmed down version without DTDs and with a saner solution for namespaces.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec. The spec is whatever Gruber’s script is doing, by definition.
mcv 4y ago
All complaints basically seem to boil down to these two: * It's not standardised * I don't like using it I think the two big advantages of markdown are simply: * It's readable without having to parse it * A lot of people do like using it Replacing it with HTML, as useful as HTML is for its intended purpose, sounds like an incredibly bad idea. There's a very good reason why markdown won: its readability. Except for tables, but that's why people don't use them. It's not meant to be suitable for every conceivable purpose, it's meant to be readable. Using a rich text editor for it sounds like a bad idea to me, because you don't know what the raw text is going to look like. And yes, I do type > for blockquotes. It's not very hard to do. Should we have a single standard for markdown? The lack of one seems to be the primary disadvantage of markdown, but personally I'm not sure it really needs a standard. It's pretty simple and I don't think it really needs to be portable. But it would certainly be nice to have a standard.
- tgv 4y ago
  Use of block quotes is rare anyway. It's just very practical, easy to adjust, its output fairly well matches your expectation. It covers 99% of your everyday needs.
  - bborud 4y ago
    I occasionally use the syntax used for code highlighting as a substitute. Sure, not the same thing, but still. https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/working-with-advanced-formatting/creating-and-highlighting-code-blocks https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...
ozim 4y ago
Because rich text in general is just a minefield. Just get into copy pasting stuff from word to some browser rich text field - people will expect it works flawlessly but I know it will break in dozen different ways. Problem is not with markdown - problem is with rich text in general. Markdown is useful as it limits the options to make stuff easier. Argument that you need post process it to be useful is not that good - because that is the point of markdown you have "raw" data that is easy to post process any way you want. If you need some really fancy embeds and changes then maybe it is just not the right tool? I don't use tables in markdown (besides maybe 3-rows 3-columns) but if you need more you probably should just stick with word/excel. I don't see a way to make tables in ASCII/UTF that would not suck.
coffeeblack 4y ago
Markdown is the HTML what JSON is to XML.
Falkon1313 4y ago
>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. >anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter. Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. >Markdown will never get beyond developers. Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers. I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.
- threatofrain 4y ago
  > No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. > Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
  - Pereza0 4y ago
    There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many
Gordonjcp 4y ago
I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it. ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on. Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.
- jrib 4y ago
  I wish the slashes for italic had made it into what is currently Markdown. /italics/ and *bold* feel much more natural to me than having to remember whether a single asterisk (text) or double asterisk (*text*) corresponds to italics or bold.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    You can escape asterisks on HN with \.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    There's nothing stopping you forking a project like Github did and making a Jrib-Flavoured-Markdown parser. I'd use it, just to get the italics and bold right.
MattPalmer1086 4y ago
The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it. Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document. The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use. I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great. Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.
prepend 4y ago
“I don’t like popular thing. It sucks. There should be something better.” Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable. I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.
- prewett 4y ago
  I'd like Markdown if things were non-arbitrary. Is asterisk or underline italics? Does the href go before or after the link text? And I have no idea what the format of lists is, I guess you just put "-" or "1." and it automatically recognizes it? > Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes I bet you can teach people the subset of HTML that includes the Markdown features in about five minutes, too.
  - prepend 4y ago
    I think it’s harder to teach html because there are start/end, paragraphs, like breaks, quotes, etc. it’s much harder. I’ve had no success with non-tech people updating html stored in repos and file systems.
Kwpolska 4y ago
> Adding in any sort of extra meta data usually requires using YAML, the rules of which are a mystery to me. That's not the fault of Markdown and not part of Markdown at all. Markdown doesn't say anything about metadata. Use of YAML at the top of Markdown documents was invented elsewhere (Jekyll, I believe), and any tools can use whatever they like. > Numbered lists. Again, you need to use an editor to stay sane. Or you can just type 1. in front of every line and let the Markdown renderer take care of numbering. > What the hell are task lists anyways? Why do they exist? Again, not a standard Markdown feature. They are a GitHub invention for adding checkboxes to issues and tracking the progress of things. They're convenient for places like GitHub, but if you're writing some documentation, you can just ignore them. > The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. YAGNI. And many of those would not necessarily be part of the Markdown document - in a blog, the <article> would be outside of Markdown and instead part of the main template (which is by necessity HTMLish). > Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. Why not? I can just copy-paste the embed widget from YouTube and paste it in my Markdown. The (Gruber) spec allows HTML inside Markdown. A thing that knows how to turn a link to the social-media-site-du-jour into a nice widget is outside the scope of a simple markup language (it would need a large database and constant updates).
longrod 4y ago
HTML is not for writing but for creating UIs. That was why it was created anyway. Markdown was specifically created for writing. It has no other purpose. Saying that Markdown is bad is really naive. There are not many ways to specify formatting without it getting in the way of your writing. Markdown is popular because it strikes the right balance where reading a markdown document requires a lot less visual strain compared to the same HTML document. It requires the least amount of letters to specify formatting - italics is 2 chars, bold is 4 chars, underline is 2 chars etc. Lists are mostly inferred and require no additional formatting. Compare that to HTML which requires 5+n chars (where n is the number of chars in the tag name) regardless of which format you want to use. Markdown does have it's quirks but they don't come up 99% of the time unless finding them is specifically your intention. Knowing whether *__hello__* is bold italic or italic bold is not important unless you are writing a parser. The downsides of Markdown are much, much less than the downsides of HTML. Writing is not the same as designing a website or a UI. It's not meant to be pretty and typesetting + styling should not be the concern of writers.
- xigoi 4y ago
  HTML was created as a document format. The UI features were added later.
- Stranger43 4y ago
  Html was absolutely created for writing, though it later got hijacked as a system for creating UI's inside of the browser doing the browser wars of the 90ies, but if you look at the original specs, it's a way of marking up documents and it was very much readable even without a rendering engine. Prior to html and the web revolution people would use different macro packages for either troff or TeX and, and in the first years of HTML people would absolutely write it by hand thinking very little of it but then again that was before style elements css and javascript. After the browser wars almost everyone who working with documentation had their own perl, or ruby scripts to take some simplified markdown syntax into html and there is of cause a risk of markdown itself getting bloated to the point where people need scripts to turn simple meta formats into correct markdown.
shapefrog 4y ago
Proposed solution - write in html . Thanks for stopping by, but no thanks.
Ekaros 4y ago
If you want to write beautiful documents. Use something else, be it html+css, word, latex and so on. But at the same time accept that these are potentially time consuming and complicated to do by hand or even with tools. Markdown and likes are for the case of fast and minimal styling, while still being human readable and writable. Which is very reasonable trade-off. And I will take it every day. Don't try to force something like tags for writing as that would be just horrid.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  I can generate a LaTeX document from a Markdown document. Or an HTML document. Or a Word document. I'm not going to send or print Markdown, I'm going to generate some delivery format from it.
WolfOliver 4y ago
The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already. Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one? [text](http://url http://url) [http://url](text) http://url](text) (http://url)[text] http://url)[text] (text)[http://url http://url]
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  Muscle memory? Do you have trouble remembering how anchor tags work in html?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    You're appealing to the law of averages here; all things aren't necessarily equally easy to remember. There's no arbitrary order that has to be remembered with an anchor tag: all tags start with an angle bracket, what they are (if we include the "/" in the name), and a list of attributes, and are closed with another angle bracket. If some elements were opened with square brackets and closed with angle brackets, it would be harder to remember. It would be worse if there were also others that opened with angle brackets and closed with square brackets. It will always be easier to remember a 10-letter name than a 10-digit number.
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  I'm always having to look up the link format for reddit, and I always seem to get it backwards one-way-or-another first try. That's where markdown breaks down, at least for my uses. When you get beyond headings, lists, bold and italics, the complexity increases sharply. Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures. <b>this is bold</b> is really not much different <a href="">This is a link</a> and the heirarchy of <table> <tr> <td>.
- infensus 4y ago
  I memorized it by thinking about it like a function call — so () comes last
- 4y ago
kkfx 4y ago
MD is popular because most do not know org-mode, that's is. As usual bad things spread most thanks to some third party interests...
- hisnameishank 4y ago
  piggy backing on this comment to mention that github can render .org files :).
  - trey-jones 4y ago
    Alas, not perfectly, but yes. All of my repos have readme.org, not README.md
- D13Fd 4y ago
  Probably because org-mode has a horrible name.
- afarviral 4y ago
  Not really, it's because org-mode is completely almost unusable outside of Emacs. Unlike Markdown, it looks terrible as truly plain text. And Emacs, while great in so many ways, is is an esoteric paradigm (same with vim, but many of us are hooked on it anyway). Ubiquitous keyboard layouts, text editing and markup paradigms are all due for a massive shake up, but agreed they have a lot to learn from the Emacs stuff.
rawoke083600 4y ago
In this case (MD) my pet-theory... "Simplicity" There are usually a few "models/reasons" to explain adoption. These models/reasons (mentioned below) all have their own "threshold or critical values" depending on model-and-industry 1. Simplicity: (a.k.a accessibility) MD is def simpler than let say HTML. I can teach someone MD in a day and they will be 'productive' in it for a wide variety of tasks. I can't teach someone HTML + CSS in a day AND be productive. 2. Price: If you are x5 cheaper than your competitor but provide lets say 0.7 of the feature set you probably going to win (PS. X5 and 0.7 are the variables to be solved and not real numbers) 3. Better: If you are x10 better and let say only 2.5x more expensive you probably going to win as well. 4. Established-Network(audience): Good example is SQL or USB. Neither is really fantastic and there are certainly better and cheaper solutions out there. Yet it's hard to argue with something in tech that is "good-enough". Would love to see some big-ass economic study of these and their critical values. Examples: VHS-BetaMax, WhatsApp-SMS-Blackberry, USB-XYZ etc.
orwin 4y ago
My sister, ex-chef curently a biology student at the uni, have no idea how to develop or how to fix her computer issues. She uses joplin, and edit her markdown notes through a text editor. She told me it took her 5 minutes to understand how to add images (and she still don't understand how the alignment works, but to be fair, only LateX is working well for this). In fact, not using a WYSIWYG editor have an advantage if you're not a professionnal Word user: you don't loose time fiddling with the setting, selectionning texts, not getting why you should backspace twice here and once there (Fuck you Jira) and remove all "automagic". I made a post about powershell yesterday and explained that to me, while PS was more pwerfull than bash (and easier), my lack of understanding and trust made me wary. Someone responded to me on a tangent on ExtJS: `it's a really good example of "simple vs. easy"`. This is the case here. Markdown is just simple (for the user). I think my brother tried to taught her vim and build her a customized vim with markdown, surround, biology french dictionnaries[0] and a better autocomplete, but i don't think she uses it (because while it is easier, it is not simple. Hey, same thing!). [0] I had no idea you could do this, but he made it so that if she was in the "marine biology" folder, she have a different dictionnary than if she is in the "microbiology" or "chemistry" folder. This made my LaTeX-fu even better than in was.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
People are lazy by default, they prefer simplicity and convenience. HTML compared to markdown has better results, but is less convenient and more complex. That's all what is there. I used to write notes in HTML and for example creating list in HTML is annoyingly slow and tedious process, while creating list in markdown is just writing one symbol. Done. Then you will get to create inline code or block of code, suddenly you need to write span (or div) pointing on a CSS class where you will specify formatting of that inline code. So you need to link CSS file or have CSS code in header of your HTML file. In markdown you will just use one symbol (or three for code block). Done.
vanderZwan 4y ago
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. While most other complaints sounded more like the typical markdown grumpiness I've heard before, I do find this an interesting argument. Why even have article, section, etc. if markdown ensures we're never going to use it? It's not like these are truly exotic tags that are complicated in their usage. Of course if you allow mixing html tags with markdown this is a bit of a non-problem in practice.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  The point of Markdown isn't to replace HTML. It lets you write a plaintext document that can be post-processed into a rich text document (including HTML). It doesn't define the rich text template, styling, or anything else. It certainly isn't meant to have a 1:1 relationship with every HTML element. With Markdown I can type up a document in the most brain dead of editors. I can then effectively read that document in the most brain dead of readers, event just printing it to a terminal. That simple document I can run through any number of post-processors and get great looking documents in a variety of delivery formats.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    I agree that that is the "point of Markdown", but that is also not as relevant as how it is actually used. It's one thing to use it as a better BB-code in chat programs, forums and on Github, as other comments mention. However, the article seems to be complaining about how it is used to write websites and articles even when patching the holes in Markdown end up being more of a hassle than just using HTML (that MDN screenshot looks horrible). That goes beyond the example you are talking about. The other argument, that perhaps the issue with rich text formatting isn't the rich text formatting, but the fact that historically rich text formatting tools tended produce awful HTML, also sounds like there might be something to it (not sure if that's still true though). I cannot imagine that it would be that hard to produce minimal HTML that supports 90% of basic rich text needs one has, in a way that is perfectly compatible with any classless CSS framework you then decide to throw at the output.
wallmountedtv 4y ago
> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Did the author just look past Slack, Reddit, Discord, Teams, and more? I am honestly lost how one could make such a statement when its already in so many places where the primary audience is non-developers. They even list Reddit in their own post, but still make this statement?!
goodpoint 4y ago
Markdown is popular because most developers are too lazy to look for better alternative and follow the hivemind.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  To expand on the hivemind, it was pushed by an Apple-sponsored tech blogger while Apple was continuing their push to market their laptops to frontend web developers. A bunch of Apple laptop developers then started embedding it although the spec had weird issues. The best substitute was Asciidoc, and it also made a few strange choices and is nearly too complex to justify using over HTML. So, with no good light alternative, Markdown won.
tambourine_man 4y ago
> ###*this is __test__* … Is that bold with italics? Italic bold? In a heading? That’s not a markdown-only characteristic, it’s the same with HTML. > Markdown will never get beyond developers Ever heard of WhatsApp? A few billion people use it everyday.
zapzupnz 4y ago
Nobody has anything to say to me about text formatting specifications when their blog has so little text contrast. I know, not the same issue, just pointing that out.
p0nce 4y ago
Because the decision to "make it alway parse" is very fitting for content to be displayed on screen. If there is no visible bug, why report an error?
rhaway84773 4y ago
The claim that Markdown will never go beyond developers is kind of ironic considering markdown was co-invented by John Gruber, a non-developer. There’s a lot of issues with this post, which basically completely misunderstands what markdown is, what its purpose is, and why it’s successful. Btw, why are numbered lists so hard in Markdown?
- lancebeet 4y ago
  It's also amusing given that Microsoft teams has at least limited support for markdown. Depending on how you define a markdown user, it may be a that the majority of people typing markdown have never written a line of code but have discovered the convenience of markdown from being power users of Microsoft teams.
  - potatochup 4y ago
    God, there is nothing that I hate more than MS teams editor. It's the worst of wysiwyg editing. Discord does it right imo.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > There’s a lot of issues with this post, which basically completely misunderstands what markdown is, what its purpose is, and why it’s successful. A lot of mystery issues that you are claiming but also not clarifying; at least the post attempts to make a case for something. I don't even know why you don't like Markdown's list markup. Give us a hint?
yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. I don't think that's what Markdown is for. I think Markdown is meant for the content that would appear inside the `article` tag. You're not meant to use it to create an entire website layout.
keeperoftruth 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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JustSomeNobody 4y ago
In an article linked from this one, they advocate for, wait for it, yet another markup language (albeit a subset of html). > What I would want is a simple .htmd standard file format, which - like all the "lightweight markup languages" out there - is just text containing a strict subset of HTML (no forms and iframes) and CSS which basically mimics the output of Markdown. So, basically, they want Markdown with angle bracket. Yay? No. Yuk.
afarviral 4y ago
It's almost like we need some kind of lightweight markup language like HTML that lets us focus more on the content, with less boilerplate... so something like markdown in other words, then? I don't think the problems Russel mentions are as big of a deal. I've never encountered an issue due to the inconsistent spec. The basic markdown practices are so simple they just work, and when they don't it's clear you need to make a slight adjustment. At worst you are missing something you want to use that's not available in the flavor at hand. In the places I commonly write markdown there is no need for a complex tool-chain to render it as HTML, it's either a real-time part of the apps I use, or I consume it as plain text. I'd be curious how Mozilla is finding it. I know it's a favorite among bloggers, but I'm not sure about such rich documentation as MDM, the quality of which has never been better in my view. I think we need to invent new ways to store and retrieve enriched/inter-related/hierarchical data in a way that's convenient, interoperable and ubiquitous. I can't think of any though, can you? Something like a relational database, but lightweight like plain text, but richer, like a website.
_ZeD_ 4y ago
you can always switch to rst¹ and sphinx² to produce html/pdf came join the dark side, we have tables³ :) 1. https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html 2. https://www.sphinx-doc.org https://www.sphinx-doc.org 3. https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#tables https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...
grose 4y ago
I think in order to make HTML a friendly document standard it needs to be easy to type on mobile. At least in my experience it is quite painful typing HMTL tags (needing to dance between 3 keyboards). This could be implemented with a built-in WYSIWYG style editor on mobile (maybe piggy-back on the contentEditable stuff?). I would love it if there was a standard native rich text widget for HTML. On one of my sites (message board), I use Markdown but custom HTML tags for extensions like file attachments. You can allow these custom tags in your HTML sanitizer and replace them at render time with output from some template. So dragging and dropping a file would add <foo-file data-id="uuid-goes-here"> to your input box. Seems like a decent middle ground with common things easy to type with Markdown and special magic as HTML tags.
- deltarholamda 4y ago
  >it needs to be easy to type on mobile This is a great point. I've written a lot of stuff just using HTML, even doing the table formatting, by just opening up BBEdit and going to town. It's really easy once you learn the basics. There are (were?) a lot of secretaries who deeply loved WordPerfect because of the ability to open up the codes window so they could fix weird formatting errors. They're just a couple of steps from authoring directly in HTML if they so wanted. But it didn't occur to me that a non-trivial amount of stuff is composed on somebody's phone. A WYSIWYG editor on mobile is certainly doable, but screen real estate is precious on a phone. Markdown certainly helps with that.
- xigoi 4y ago
  QWERTY and similar keyboard layouts are not designed for phones. I recommend MessagEase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me... (Unfortunately it's proprietary and patented, but I haven't found anything better)
throwaway13337 4y ago
Has anyone made a markdown only web browser? Consumers should be able to control the presentation of the content they view. They should provide the theme. Markdown could provide the minimal content and linking. It seems like it would be possible to remake all the major web properties this way while returning control back to the consumer and preventing egregious advertising, tracking, and popups. Reddit, Google Search, substack/medium/etc all could be remade in this more consumer-centric viewport. The markdown browser would be a strong promise a lot of anti-user behavior. The modern browser is more an application development platform - let's treat it that way. A web browser's presentation should be in control of the consumer.
- mcluck 4y ago
  You might be interested in Gemini and the browsers implemented for it https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
ogogmad 4y ago
I recommend trying out Asciidoc: https://asciidoc.org/ https://asciidoc.org/ The spec is fairly comprehensive. It's a lightweight markup language like Markdown. It has decent editor support.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Asciidoc was originally designed to be directly translatable into Docbook XML, and thus slot into a Docbook-based production system. So it covers a lot more ground than MD was originally intended to. There's also rst, which was developed with documentation in mind.
D13Fd 4y ago
This post is absolutely right. I've been keeping my personal notes as a folder of text files formatted with Markdown for 10+ years. I honestly really don't like it in some ways. My work involves a ton of characters that trip up Markdown interpreters, and I end up having to escape them (brackets, asterisks)--and not all editors treat them, or the escape characters, the same way. But nothing else fits my use case as well, so I've stuck with Markdown.
MattDemers 4y ago
I think part of why it's popular is that it's a sexier implementation of HTML, and as a writer, I found it frustrating to hand in edits to editors (for news websites) in Word format. Being able to give people a plain text version of my article and have it translate anywhere was/is amazing, and it's much smoother to write "" or "*" than it is to put "<em>" or "<strong>". I use Markdown a ton because it's easy to use converters to get that HTML code for blogs or have it built into plugins for Notepad++, Sublime or Atom.
iKnowKungFoo 4y ago
First time I encountered Markdown: "Wait, isn't this WordPerfect for DOS?"
dpkirchner 4y ago
To me it comes down to one basic thing: I can create decent looking text content without using my mouse/trackpad or F-keys. It's about as easy to write as it could possibly be. Additionally, I don't have to worry about the editor inserting weird annoying-to-parse markup elements mid-text as I've seen in Word documents (in the docx XML).
ChrisArchitect 4y ago
Textile. IYKYK But really it comes down to historically the time and place when it was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.
- Optimal_Persona 4y ago
  I always thought Textile was the superior Betamax to Markdown's VHS, but John Gruber's popularity is what helped Markdown take over.
bborud 4y ago
Markdown is popular because it implements just enough features to be useful while not presenting a high threshold for "just writing things down". It exists because traditionally, people who design markup languages have not done a particularly good job in designing something that is suitable for adding a just enough structure to text to make it useful both as text and as rendered document. (If you want to look at a particularly egregious example of hubris, arrogance and total lack of empathy for users and implementors alike, look at ISO 8879:1986. The cheapest way is probably to get hold of an annotated standard is probably by buying Goldfarb's SGML Handbook. Please burn after reading though - to keep it out of the hands of impressionable kids) I had a long discussion about using HTML+CSS with one of the designers of CSS many moons ago, and sure, in theory we could have used that. But you need only do a "view source" on any web page you regularly visit to realize that it is anything but low threshold.
amai 4y ago
This seems to be another guy who doesn't know https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/.
amai 4y ago
When will hackernews support Markdown to it's comments?
tanseydavid 4y ago
My biggest attraction to Markdown has been avoiding ANY use of browser-based WYSIWYG editors. Multiple times the author asserts that people will resort to a WYSIWYG tool for some Markdown formatting. I expect this is largely true, but I can't be the only one who has sworn off WYSIWYG in the browser but it ends being so frustrating.
joernl 4y ago
I chose markdown for a large project due to the reduce storage size and forced simplicity and abstraction. I have to work with static data which will not change for 10 years, the only way to keep it alive is upcasting the internal structure and updating the conversion to html. The project lives in a scientific environment but is used by a wide variety of people. The project is now 5 years old and until next week there was no wysiwyg-editor (I'm currently working on it).
- xigoi 4y ago
  What kind of project is it that the storage size of text documents is a big deal? And why don't you use compression?
  - joernl 4y ago
    It's an electronic testing and examination environment for German universities. It's very far from big data, but we have to support very small universities with very limited tech budget. We pre-generate and store the exams to ensure that we do not have any compatibility issues in the future (e.g. by changing minute elements of the randomisation). The biggest database currently is about 700GB and I assume that we'll reach an equilibrium at around 2 TB.
TrevorFSmith 4y ago
Any author that writes "it's a matter of simply deciding on a manageable subset of HTML and CSS and then calling it a standard" with a straight face may not understand the meaning of many of those words. Actual standardization (of the open web variety) is inherently hard. Nobody (and I do mean not one person) agrees with anyone else on which subsets of HTML and CSS are necessary. CommonMark exists: https://commonmark.org/ https://commonmark.org/
paultopia 4y ago
Currently finishing my third (full-length academic) book in markdown. Wrote the second book in markdown too. Wrote the first book in MS word. Never going back. Here's the thing. Word is a buggy bloated piece of shit application with an incomprehensible and ever-changing UI that requires 20 mouse clicks hunting through badly labeled menus to do anything. Latex is far too complicated for prose that doesn't have equations all in it, and is also unsupported by publishers outside of the sciences. Alternative word processors (OpenOffice, Pages, the desiccated shell of WordPerfect) are either buggy, ugly, unmaintained, lack critical features, or all of the above. So I just write in markdown in emacs. Markdown mode in emacs works very well, I have hardly any customizations on top. One file per chapter. References in zotero, insert citations in better bibtex. Compile it all in pandoc. When I want to revise I just concatenate the files and compile it to PDF and read my own work there. When I want to submit to a publisher I just compile it to word. I have a makefile that handles all of that for me. Then I make a few tiny tweaks in the garbage program and submit. This is the best workflow I've ever found for academic writing, because pandoc-enhanced markdown and better bibtex enhanced zotero give you everything you really need for academic writing (like control over reference formats), and nothing you don't need (endless nightmarish word bloat). And you can just store it all in a GitHub repo.
russellbeattie 4y ago
Heh. Author here. Not sure how I missed this since I'm on HN daily. Must have come and gone quick! I had no idea. I haven't seen this much rabid hysteria aimed at something I've written for a while! Nice. Given that I practically live here, it's not unexpected, but still... Wow.

107 points by rcarmo 4y ago

I actually love using plain text to create documents, but I'm also bothered by the irregularity and non-extensibility of Markdown, which is why I created xidoc: https://xidoc.nim.town/ https://xidoc.nim.town/

I_complete_me 4y ago
Let me commend you on this effort. I would definitely consider using it in a situation where markdown did not suffice. It does require nim and nimble to be installed but that doesn't bother me.
- xigoi 4y ago
  At least the installation is easy, unlike many projects written is other languages where you need to manually install a billion dependencies and edit some obscure configuration files :)

martyalain 4y ago

Hi, It's said that the father of LISP, John McCarthy, lamented the W3C's choice of SGML as the basis for HTML : « An environment where the markup, styling and scripting is all s-expression based would be nice. » The {lambda way} project could be an answer, small and simple : http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/ What do you think of this answer?

nikodotio 4y ago
(:b (:i “we love hiccup”))
- martyalain 4y ago
  {p {b hi nkodotio} Could you tell us more about {i hicupp}?}

endtime 4y ago

> Blockquotes. Are people really typing > before each paragraph? No, they’re using an editor. Yes they are, and no they aren't, respectively.

gerikson 4y ago

Markdown is the worst way to write HTML except for all the rest.

donquichotte 4y ago
You had me in the first half, I'm not gonna lie.
- janfoeh 4y ago
  Thank you for not lying; it is appreciated.
frizlab 4y ago
Asciidoc is much better IMHO
- matijsvzuijlen 4y ago
  Asciidoc starts out great but has a lot of surprising gotchas and complexities.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I dislike Markdown, but I can't help finding Asciidoc annoying. There's got to be an "Asciidoc: The Good Parts" waiting to be written.

Beltalowda 4y ago

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. In my experience it works pretty well for non-developers. I added it to our email client years ago as an alternative to the WYSIWYG editor, and quite a few non-developers liked and used it. Also see Reddit, which uses it. While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there. As for the larger point: do I have a great love of Markdown? Not really; I think some of the other similar formats are better. But it works "well enough", and switching syntaxes is hard so I "just use Markdown" . I hate the "GitHub flavoured Markdown" with a passion though; the way it deals with newlines is just fundamentally broken and it's inconsistent even on GitHub where some things are GFM and some things are not (which they need to be, because GFM is fundamentally broken) leading to sillyness like copy/pasting text from one part of GitHub to another part ending up with badly formatted text. Either way, whatever the faults of Markdown may be, I sure as hell prefer it over any HTML subset. Writing <i>emphasis</i> is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; there's few things I dislike more than having to focus on the presentation as I'm writing something.

Freak_NL 4y ago
In every company there will be a few who just can't grasp Markdown, but they can't grasp any markup language, and struggle in WYSIWYG editors (like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer, or Google Docs) too (usually not grasping the concept of the document outline created by applying header styles correctly). The best option there is to simply help them and correct their output (again and again); there is no technological silver bullet to solve it. Newlines in Markdown are pretty weirdly implemented, certainly! The canonical markup seems to be to make paragraphs by having two newlines (which all tools do), and to have an actual newline within a paragraph by ending the preceding sentence with two spaces and a newline. I'd love it if all tools did that, but an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  It's always going to be hard to settle on a solution that works for everyone; I also struggle with things like Google Docs. But if people struggle with Markdown and word processors ... yeah, I don't know what else can be done. > an argument raised on the issue tracker of one of these (CodiMD) was that moving to the correct behaviour would break many existing documents where people had gotten used to lines breaking at the presence of just a single newline. Yeah, I don't expect the current situation to be resolved any time soon.

stevage 4y ago

The author is mixing up two different things: the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) and the existing specification of Markdown-with-a-capital-M (and its flow on effects). The concept is fine. The author may not want to manually write markdown, and may think that no one else wants to either, but they are wrong. It's very very useful to have a way to store formatted text without the horrors of full blown HTML. You can stick some markdown in a CMS database, render it on a webpage, and get the most common formatting: links, bullet points, bold. Great. On the actual spec/implementation: yes, it's a complete disaster. Especially the way it is kind of mapped on to HTML, so you get weird things like writing "1. blah; \ 1. blah" makes a numbered list with a 1 and a 2. But mixed in there, the author seems to have some weird assumptions that people are using Markdown primarily to write documentation, and this is somehow Markdown's fault. I genuinely don't understand this, or their point 13 "It’s 2022, we shouldn’t be using ascii-text to write documents." Clearly we do need something like Markdown, but the existing attempts (including Mediawiki's "wikitext") all reveal that design a markdown syntax looks easy, but is actually extremely difficult to do well.

Freak_NL 4y ago
For their major gripe that point 13 is a pretty weak one. Text editors can present a Markdown document any way you want, and even a WYSIWYG editor is possible if you like that. Besides, Markdown fully supports alternate character encodings, not just ASCII (that would make Markdown really obsolete). Most people surely use UTF-8 for Markdown documents.
azangru 4y ago
> the concept of markdown (text with a little bit of light formatting mixed into it with easy-on-the-eye syntax) Isn't it markup?
- jeltz 4y ago
  No, it is specifically markup which tries to be nice to read even unrendered. Reading HTML source code is rarely nice and that is also a form of markup language.

The_Colonel 4y ago

I like Markdown for self-contained one page documents with basic formatting - reddit comments, README.md etc. For anything more it's just inadequate.

Ekaros 4y ago
And on other hand tools suitable for more complex things are probably too much for one page documents. So it is really choosing right tool for right job.
themadturk 4y ago
I wrote a 98,000+ word novel in Markdown. Pandoc renders it perfectly to Word. The text included a title page, epigraphs in italic, headers of various levels for parts, chapters, scenes. All I had to do in Word was make sure my paragraph styles were set up the way I wanted (and that Pandoc knew what they were supposed to look like), then run a macro to get rid of the cr/lfs between paragraphs. I don't know if the novel was any good, but it looked good. Markdown was certainly adequate.
- The_Colonel 4y ago
  What I had more in mind was e.g. linking between different documents, images, tables, footnotes etc. I guess most of these are possible (depending on your Markdown flavor), but largely very awkward.

azangru 4y ago

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Not only is this probably incorrect; but even if it were the case, then: - so what? - doesn't this contradict the title lamenting the popularity of markdown?

halfbrite 4y ago
You are right. Case and point; Discord - bringing basic markdown to the masses.
- evgen 4y ago
  Slack and Discord have probably made more people into casual Markdown users who do not even know that they are using Markdown. When I told my wife Obsidian lets her keep notes using Markdown she was not convinced, once she tried her response was 'oh, it is just like one big Slack message window'.

nwellnhof 4y ago

While I agree with many of the points, the proposal that we need a a new standard based on HTML is a bit weird. I guess the author hasn't read the HTML5 spec which is a total monstrosity and suffers from problems similar to Markdown. If you want a document format where essentially every document is valid, you have to specify each and every corner case which gets messy very quickly. Just look at the HTML5 spec. To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec. CommonMark comes closest, but it's still a mostly informal spec often based on examples. In my opinion, the best option is still XML, or better yet some slimmed down version without DTDs and with a saner solution for namespaces.

kergonath 4y ago
> To my knowledge, there isn't even a formal, unambigious Markdown spec. The spec is whatever Gruber’s script is doing, by definition.

mcv 4y ago

All complaints basically seem to boil down to these two: * It's not standardised * I don't like using it I think the two big advantages of markdown are simply: * It's readable without having to parse it * A lot of people do like using it Replacing it with HTML, as useful as HTML is for its intended purpose, sounds like an incredibly bad idea. There's a very good reason why markdown won: its readability. Except for tables, but that's why people don't use them. It's not meant to be suitable for every conceivable purpose, it's meant to be readable. Using a rich text editor for it sounds like a bad idea to me, because you don't know what the raw text is going to look like. And yes, I do type > for blockquotes. It's not very hard to do. Should we have a single standard for markdown? The lack of one seems to be the primary disadvantage of markdown, but personally I'm not sure it really needs a standard. It's pretty simple and I don't think it really needs to be portable. But it would certainly be nice to have a standard.

tgv 4y ago
Use of block quotes is rare anyway. It's just very practical, easy to adjust, its output fairly well matches your expectation. It covers 99% of your everyday needs.
- bborud 4y ago
  I occasionally use the syntax used for code highlighting as a substitute. Sure, not the same thing, but still. https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/working-with-advanced-formatting/creating-and-highlighting-code-blocks https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/writing-on-github/wor...

ozim 4y ago

Because rich text in general is just a minefield. Just get into copy pasting stuff from word to some browser rich text field - people will expect it works flawlessly but I know it will break in dozen different ways. Problem is not with markdown - problem is with rich text in general. Markdown is useful as it limits the options to make stuff easier. Argument that you need post process it to be useful is not that good - because that is the point of markdown you have "raw" data that is easy to post process any way you want. If you need some really fancy embeds and changes then maybe it is just not the right tool? I don't use tables in markdown (besides maybe 3-rows 3-columns) but if you need more you probably should just stick with word/excel. I don't see a way to make tables in ASCII/UTF that would not suck.

coffeeblack 4y ago

Markdown is the HTML what JSON is to XML.

Falkon1313 4y ago

>It’s barely a spec Which is fitting. It evolved long before the term 'markdown' itself existed, a practice having been used in email and usenet and BBSes for many years before. The 'spec' is just trying to codify the already-existing usage, which evolved organically in many different areas by many different people. >You need to use a WYSIWYG tool or you don’t use it. No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. >anyone who writes Markdown regularly using a WYSIWYG editor or an IDE already, so the whole ‘plain text’ thing doesn’t matter. Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. >Markdown will never get beyond developers. Gonna have to go way back in time and alter history in order to change that. Like, before HTML or the web. It was used by everyone, certainly not just developers. I thought this must've been written by someone very young who never even saw the internet or tech until a few years ago. Yet the author claims to have become a programmer in the mid-1990s and somehow still doesn't understand the concept of plain text or how the internet developed, and how markdown came about - that is a little baffling.

threatofrain 4y ago
> No, no you absolutely don't. Almost no one uses a WYSIWYG for markdown. That would completely negate the point. > Probably 99% wrong. I've never met anyone that chose to make things more difficult for themselves by using a clunky WYSIWYG instead of just typing the markdown in a text editor. Sometimes that's an IDE, but that's beside the point. Plain text does matter. You repeat this point but the trend of markdown apps is to this direction. Have you never met anyone who uses Obsidian? Bear? Ulysses? Even Notion is just markdown+, which is why it's one of the import/export options. And no, these apps do not defeat the point of using markdown.
- Pereza0 4y ago
  There is really little way of knowing who is actually using these apps vs who is just firing up an editor. Just because apps are being developed in this direction doesn't automatically mean they are becoming the norm. The fact they are leaning towards WYSIWYG makes sense to me when you try to think of other features you could have for editing Markdown that something that, say, Vim can't do... I cant really think of many

Gordonjcp 4y ago

I think the author is missing a fairly major point, that Markdown was intended to be a way to process text written the way people already wrote it. ASCII is absolutely the best way to write documents, if you're working in a primarily ASCII environment. Crabbit old bastards like me who remember the dialup BBS days consider Markdown-like text to be standard - underline things with a row of hyphens, mark a heading by underlining with # symbols or = symbols depending on how "strong" you want the heading to be, emphasis words with *asterisks like this* and italicise with /slashes like this/ (okay they got that one a bit wrong but still the point stands). Make a bulleted list by indenting a bit and putting a * at the start of the line, and so on. Before Markdown-the-specification and set of libraries to transform text to HTML existed, there were already a wealth of documents in somewhat Markdown-like syntax. Being able to transform them into something that "kids these days" with their high-resolution 800x600 pixel bitmap displays can view in a cool font came long after.

jrib 4y ago
I wish the slashes for italic had made it into what is currently Markdown. /italics/ and *bold* feel much more natural to me than having to remember whether a single asterisk (text) or double asterisk (*text*) corresponds to italics or bold.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You can escape asterisks on HN with \.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  There's nothing stopping you forking a project like Github did and making a Jrib-Flavoured-Markdown parser. I'd use it, just to get the italics and bold right.

MattPalmer1086 4y ago

The author clearly doesn't understand the appeal of it. Some of the points don't make sense. For example, he says it separates the design from the content. Er, no, it doesn't. It puts the design in the content, but in a human readable and writable way, like an old type-written document. The chief selling point of markdown for me is I can write simple, portable and usually short documents which can be easily read and edited in a text editor, and that you can put under version control. And you can transform it into other rich text formats if you want a pretty document too. In that sense, it's a bit like LaTex, but not as hard to understand or use. I would agree that the lack of standardisation is a problem, and that doing complicated things in it starts losing the benefit. But for simple documents it's just great. Edit: I guess it does separate the design from the content, if you mean things like choosing what fonts to use when transforming it into a different rich text format. I was erroneously thinking he meant the structure of the document.

prepend 4y ago

“I don’t like popular thing. It sucks. There should be something better.” Markdown is popular because it’s useful. It’s useful because it’s easy and free and portable. I know html very well, I use markdown because it’s faster to take notes or make simple posts. Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes and they can be productive editing headers and bullets and text.

prewett 4y ago
I'd like Markdown if things were non-arbitrary. Is asterisk or underline italics? Does the href go before or after the link text? And I have no idea what the format of lists is, I guess you just put "-" or "1." and it automatically recognizes it? > Also I can teach someone in 5 minutes I bet you can teach people the subset of HTML that includes the Markdown features in about five minutes, too.
- prepend 4y ago
  I think it’s harder to teach html because there are start/end, paragraphs, like breaks, quotes, etc. it’s much harder. I’ve had no success with non-tech people updating html stored in repos and file systems.

Kwpolska 4y ago

> Adding in any sort of extra meta data usually requires using YAML, the rules of which are a mystery to me. That's not the fault of Markdown and not part of Markdown at all. Markdown doesn't say anything about metadata. Use of YAML at the top of Markdown documents was invented elsewhere (Jekyll, I believe), and any tools can use whatever they like. > Numbered lists. Again, you need to use an editor to stay sane. Or you can just type 1. in front of every line and let the Markdown renderer take care of numbering. > What the hell are task lists anyways? Why do they exist? Again, not a standard Markdown feature. They are a GitHub invention for adding checkboxes to issues and tracking the progress of things. They're convenient for places like GitHub, but if you're writing some documentation, you can just ignore them. > The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. YAGNI. And many of those would not necessarily be part of the Markdown document - in a blog, the <article> would be outside of Markdown and instead part of the main template (which is by necessity HTMLish). > Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. Why not? I can just copy-paste the embed widget from YouTube and paste it in my Markdown. The (Gruber) spec allows HTML inside Markdown. A thing that knows how to turn a link to the social-media-site-du-jour into a nice widget is outside the scope of a simple markup language (it would need a large database and constant updates).

longrod 4y ago

HTML is not for writing but for creating UIs. That was why it was created anyway. Markdown was specifically created for writing. It has no other purpose. Saying that Markdown is bad is really naive. There are not many ways to specify formatting without it getting in the way of your writing. Markdown is popular because it strikes the right balance where reading a markdown document requires a lot less visual strain compared to the same HTML document. It requires the least amount of letters to specify formatting - italics is 2 chars, bold is 4 chars, underline is 2 chars etc. Lists are mostly inferred and require no additional formatting. Compare that to HTML which requires 5+n chars (where n is the number of chars in the tag name) regardless of which format you want to use. Markdown does have it's quirks but they don't come up 99% of the time unless finding them is specifically your intention. Knowing whether *__hello__* is bold italic or italic bold is not important unless you are writing a parser. The downsides of Markdown are much, much less than the downsides of HTML. Writing is not the same as designing a website or a UI. It's not meant to be pretty and typesetting + styling should not be the concern of writers.

xigoi 4y ago
HTML was created as a document format. The UI features were added later.
Stranger43 4y ago
Html was absolutely created for writing, though it later got hijacked as a system for creating UI's inside of the browser doing the browser wars of the 90ies, but if you look at the original specs, it's a way of marking up documents and it was very much readable even without a rendering engine. Prior to html and the web revolution people would use different macro packages for either troff or TeX and, and in the first years of HTML people would absolutely write it by hand thinking very little of it but then again that was before style elements css and javascript. After the browser wars almost everyone who working with documentation had their own perl, or ruby scripts to take some simplified markdown syntax into html and there is of cause a risk of markdown itself getting bloated to the point where people need scripts to turn simple meta formats into correct markdown.

shapefrog 4y ago

Proposed solution - write in html . Thanks for stopping by, but no thanks.

Ekaros 4y ago

If you want to write beautiful documents. Use something else, be it html+css, word, latex and so on. But at the same time accept that these are potentially time consuming and complicated to do by hand or even with tools. Markdown and likes are for the case of fast and minimal styling, while still being human readable and writable. Which is very reasonable trade-off. And I will take it every day. Don't try to force something like tags for writing as that would be just horrid.

giantrobot 4y ago
I can generate a LaTeX document from a Markdown document. Or an HTML document. Or a Word document. I'm not going to send or print Markdown, I'm going to generate some delivery format from it.

WolfOliver 4y ago

The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already. Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one? [text](http://url http://url) [http://url](text) http://url](text) (http://url)[text] http://url)[text] (text)[http://url http://url]

JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Muscle memory? Do you have trouble remembering how anchor tags work in html?
- pessimizer 4y ago
  You're appealing to the law of averages here; all things aren't necessarily equally easy to remember. There's no arbitrary order that has to be remembered with an anchor tag: all tags start with an angle bracket, what they are (if we include the "/" in the name), and a list of attributes, and are closed with another angle bracket. If some elements were opened with square brackets and closed with angle brackets, it would be harder to remember. It would be worse if there were also others that opened with angle brackets and closed with square brackets. It will always be easier to remember a 10-letter name than a 10-digit number.
MrVandemar 4y ago
I'm always having to look up the link format for reddit, and I always seem to get it backwards one-way-or-another first try. That's where markdown breaks down, at least for my uses. When you get beyond headings, lists, bold and italics, the complexity increases sharply. Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures. <b>this is bold</b> is really not much different <a href="">This is a link</a> and the heirarchy of <table> <tr> <td>.
infensus 4y ago
I memorized it by thinking about it like a function call — so () comes last
4y ago

kkfx 4y ago

MD is popular because most do not know org-mode, that's is. As usual bad things spread most thanks to some third party interests...

hisnameishank 4y ago
piggy backing on this comment to mention that github can render .org files :).
- trey-jones 4y ago
  Alas, not perfectly, but yes. All of my repos have readme.org, not README.md
D13Fd 4y ago
Probably because org-mode has a horrible name.
afarviral 4y ago
Not really, it's because org-mode is completely almost unusable outside of Emacs. Unlike Markdown, it looks terrible as truly plain text. And Emacs, while great in so many ways, is is an esoteric paradigm (same with vim, but many of us are hooked on it anyway). Ubiquitous keyboard layouts, text editing and markup paradigms are all due for a massive shake up, but agreed they have a lot to learn from the Emacs stuff.

rawoke083600 4y ago

In this case (MD) my pet-theory... "Simplicity" There are usually a few "models/reasons" to explain adoption. These models/reasons (mentioned below) all have their own "threshold or critical values" depending on model-and-industry 1. Simplicity: (a.k.a accessibility) MD is def simpler than let say HTML. I can teach someone MD in a day and they will be 'productive' in it for a wide variety of tasks. I can't teach someone HTML + CSS in a day AND be productive. 2. Price: If you are x5 cheaper than your competitor but provide lets say 0.7 of the feature set you probably going to win (PS. X5 and 0.7 are the variables to be solved and not real numbers) 3. Better: If you are x10 better and let say only 2.5x more expensive you probably going to win as well. 4. Established-Network(audience): Good example is SQL or USB. Neither is really fantastic and there are certainly better and cheaper solutions out there. Yet it's hard to argue with something in tech that is "good-enough". Would love to see some big-ass economic study of these and their critical values. Examples: VHS-BetaMax, WhatsApp-SMS-Blackberry, USB-XYZ etc.

orwin 4y ago

My sister, ex-chef curently a biology student at the uni, have no idea how to develop or how to fix her computer issues. She uses joplin, and edit her markdown notes through a text editor. She told me it took her 5 minutes to understand how to add images (and she still don't understand how the alignment works, but to be fair, only LateX is working well for this). In fact, not using a WYSIWYG editor have an advantage if you're not a professionnal Word user: you don't loose time fiddling with the setting, selectionning texts, not getting why you should backspace twice here and once there (Fuck you Jira) and remove all "automagic". I made a post about powershell yesterday and explained that to me, while PS was more pwerfull than bash (and easier), my lack of understanding and trust made me wary. Someone responded to me on a tangent on ExtJS: `it's a really good example of "simple vs. easy"`. This is the case here. Markdown is just simple (for the user). I think my brother tried to taught her vim and build her a customized vim with markdown, surround, biology french dictionnaries[0] and a better autocomplete, but i don't think she uses it (because while it is easier, it is not simple. Hey, same thing!). [0] I had no idea you could do this, but he made it so that if she was in the "marine biology" folder, she have a different dictionnary than if she is in the "microbiology" or "chemistry" folder. This made my LaTeX-fu even better than in was.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

People are lazy by default, they prefer simplicity and convenience. HTML compared to markdown has better results, but is less convenient and more complex. That's all what is there. I used to write notes in HTML and for example creating list in HTML is annoyingly slow and tedious process, while creating list in markdown is just writing one symbol. Done. Then you will get to create inline code or block of code, suddenly you need to write span (or div) pointing on a CSS class where you will specify formatting of that inline code. So you need to link CSS file or have CSS code in header of your HTML file. In markdown you will just use one symbol (or three for code block). Done.

vanderZwan 4y ago

> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. While most other complaints sounded more like the typical markdown grumpiness I've heard before, I do find this an interesting argument. Why even have article, section, etc. if markdown ensures we're never going to use it? It's not like these are truly exotic tags that are complicated in their usage. Of course if you allow mixing html tags with markdown this is a bit of a non-problem in practice.

giantrobot 4y ago
The point of Markdown isn't to replace HTML. It lets you write a plaintext document that can be post-processed into a rich text document (including HTML). It doesn't define the rich text template, styling, or anything else. It certainly isn't meant to have a 1:1 relationship with every HTML element. With Markdown I can type up a document in the most brain dead of editors. I can then effectively read that document in the most brain dead of readers, event just printing it to a terminal. That simple document I can run through any number of post-processors and get great looking documents in a variety of delivery formats.
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  I agree that that is the "point of Markdown", but that is also not as relevant as how it is actually used. It's one thing to use it as a better BB-code in chat programs, forums and on Github, as other comments mention. However, the article seems to be complaining about how it is used to write websites and articles even when patching the holes in Markdown end up being more of a hassle than just using HTML (that MDN screenshot looks horrible). That goes beyond the example you are talking about. The other argument, that perhaps the issue with rich text formatting isn't the rich text formatting, but the fact that historically rich text formatting tools tended produce awful HTML, also sounds like there might be something to it (not sure if that's still true though). I cannot imagine that it would be that hard to produce minimal HTML that supports 90% of basic rich text needs one has, in a way that is perfectly compatible with any classless CSS framework you then decide to throw at the output.

wallmountedtv 4y ago

> Markdown will never get beyond developers. Did the author just look past Slack, Reddit, Discord, Teams, and more? I am honestly lost how one could make such a statement when its already in so many places where the primary audience is non-developers. They even list Reddit in their own post, but still make this statement?!

goodpoint 4y ago

Markdown is popular because most developers are too lazy to look for better alternative and follow the hivemind.

pessimizer 4y ago
To expand on the hivemind, it was pushed by an Apple-sponsored tech blogger while Apple was continuing their push to market their laptops to frontend web developers. A bunch of Apple laptop developers then started embedding it although the spec had weird issues. The best substitute was Asciidoc, and it also made a few strange choices and is nearly too complex to justify using over HTML. So, with no good light alternative, Markdown won.

tambourine_man 4y ago

> ###*this is __test__* … Is that bold with italics? Italic bold? In a heading? That’s not a markdown-only characteristic, it’s the same with HTML. > Markdown will never get beyond developers Ever heard of WhatsApp? A few billion people use it everyday.

zapzupnz 4y ago

Nobody has anything to say to me about text formatting specifications when their blog has so little text contrast. I know, not the same issue, just pointing that out.

p0nce 4y ago

Because the decision to "make it alway parse" is very fitting for content to be displayed on screen. If there is no visible bug, why report an error?

rhaway84773 4y ago

The claim that Markdown will never go beyond developers is kind of ironic considering markdown was co-invented by John Gruber, a non-developer. There’s a lot of issues with this post, which basically completely misunderstands what markdown is, what its purpose is, and why it’s successful. Btw, why are numbered lists so hard in Markdown?

lancebeet 4y ago
It's also amusing given that Microsoft teams has at least limited support for markdown. Depending on how you define a markdown user, it may be a that the majority of people typing markdown have never written a line of code but have discovered the convenience of markdown from being power users of Microsoft teams.
- potatochup 4y ago
  God, there is nothing that I hate more than MS teams editor. It's the worst of wysiwyg editing. Discord does it right imo.
pessimizer 4y ago
> There’s a lot of issues with this post, which basically completely misunderstands what markdown is, what its purpose is, and why it’s successful. A lot of mystery issues that you are claiming but also not clarifying; at least the post attempts to make a case for something. I don't even know why you don't like Markdown's list markup. Give us a hint?

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago

> The HTML output is antiquated at best. Though the basic structure of headers and paragraphs is generally semantic, there's no modern semantic elements such as main, article, section, nav, header, footer, figure, picture, etc. Embedding videos, social media widgets, etc. isn't possible at all. I don't think that's what Markdown is for. I think Markdown is meant for the content that would appear inside the `article` tag. You're not meant to use it to create an entire website layout.

keeperoftruth 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

In an article linked from this one, they advocate for, wait for it, yet another markup language (albeit a subset of html). > What I would want is a simple .htmd standard file format, which - like all the "lightweight markup languages" out there - is just text containing a strict subset of HTML (no forms and iframes) and CSS which basically mimics the output of Markdown. So, basically, they want Markdown with angle bracket. Yay? No. Yuk.

afarviral 4y ago

It's almost like we need some kind of lightweight markup language like HTML that lets us focus more on the content, with less boilerplate... so something like markdown in other words, then? I don't think the problems Russel mentions are as big of a deal. I've never encountered an issue due to the inconsistent spec. The basic markdown practices are so simple they just work, and when they don't it's clear you need to make a slight adjustment. At worst you are missing something you want to use that's not available in the flavor at hand. In the places I commonly write markdown there is no need for a complex tool-chain to render it as HTML, it's either a real-time part of the apps I use, or I consume it as plain text. I'd be curious how Mozilla is finding it. I know it's a favorite among bloggers, but I'm not sure about such rich documentation as MDM, the quality of which has never been better in my view. I think we need to invent new ways to store and retrieve enriched/inter-related/hierarchical data in a way that's convenient, interoperable and ubiquitous. I can't think of any though, can you? Something like a relational database, but lightweight like plain text, but richer, like a website.

_ZeD_ 4y ago

you can always switch to rst¹ and sphinx² to produce html/pdf came join the dark side, we have tables³ :) 1. https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html https://docutils.sourceforge.io/rst.html 2. https://www.sphinx-doc.org https://www.sphinx-doc.org 3. https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#tables https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...

grose 4y ago

I think in order to make HTML a friendly document standard it needs to be easy to type on mobile. At least in my experience it is quite painful typing HMTL tags (needing to dance between 3 keyboards). This could be implemented with a built-in WYSIWYG style editor on mobile (maybe piggy-back on the contentEditable stuff?). I would love it if there was a standard native rich text widget for HTML. On one of my sites (message board), I use Markdown but custom HTML tags for extensions like file attachments. You can allow these custom tags in your HTML sanitizer and replace them at render time with output from some template. So dragging and dropping a file would add <foo-file data-id="uuid-goes-here"> to your input box. Seems like a decent middle ground with common things easy to type with Markdown and special magic as HTML tags.

deltarholamda 4y ago
>it needs to be easy to type on mobile This is a great point. I've written a lot of stuff just using HTML, even doing the table formatting, by just opening up BBEdit and going to town. It's really easy once you learn the basics. There are (were?) a lot of secretaries who deeply loved WordPerfect because of the ability to open up the codes window so they could fix weird formatting errors. They're just a couple of steps from authoring directly in HTML if they so wanted. But it didn't occur to me that a non-trivial amount of stuff is composed on somebody's phone. A WYSIWYG editor on mobile is certainly doable, but screen real estate is precious on a phone. Markdown certainly helps with that.
xigoi 4y ago
QWERTY and similar keyboard layouts are not designed for phones. I recommend MessagEase: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.mekb https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.exideas.me... (Unfortunately it's proprietary and patented, but I haven't found anything better)

throwaway13337 4y ago

Has anyone made a markdown only web browser? Consumers should be able to control the presentation of the content they view. They should provide the theme. Markdown could provide the minimal content and linking. It seems like it would be possible to remake all the major web properties this way while returning control back to the consumer and preventing egregious advertising, tracking, and popups. Reddit, Google Search, substack/medium/etc all could be remade in this more consumer-centric viewport. The markdown browser would be a strong promise a lot of anti-user behavior. The modern browser is more an application development platform - let's treat it that way. A web browser's presentation should be in control of the consumer.

mcluck 4y ago
You might be interested in Gemini and the browsers implemented for it https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/

ogogmad 4y ago

I recommend trying out Asciidoc: https://asciidoc.org/ https://asciidoc.org/ The spec is fairly comprehensive. It's a lightweight markup language like Markdown. It has decent editor support.

Finnucane 4y ago
Asciidoc was originally designed to be directly translatable into Docbook XML, and thus slot into a Docbook-based production system. So it covers a lot more ground than MD was originally intended to. There's also rst, which was developed with documentation in mind.

D13Fd 4y ago

This post is absolutely right. I've been keeping my personal notes as a folder of text files formatted with Markdown for 10+ years. I honestly really don't like it in some ways. My work involves a ton of characters that trip up Markdown interpreters, and I end up having to escape them (brackets, asterisks)--and not all editors treat them, or the escape characters, the same way. But nothing else fits my use case as well, so I've stuck with Markdown.

MattDemers 4y ago

I think part of why it's popular is that it's a sexier implementation of HTML, and as a writer, I found it frustrating to hand in edits to editors (for news websites) in Word format. Being able to give people a plain text version of my article and have it translate anywhere was/is amazing, and it's much smoother to write "" or "*" than it is to put "<em>" or "<strong>". I use Markdown a ton because it's easy to use converters to get that HTML code for blogs or have it built into plugins for Notepad++, Sublime or Atom.

iKnowKungFoo 4y ago

First time I encountered Markdown: "Wait, isn't this WordPerfect for DOS?"

dpkirchner 4y ago

To me it comes down to one basic thing: I can create decent looking text content without using my mouse/trackpad or F-keys. It's about as easy to write as it could possibly be. Additionally, I don't have to worry about the editor inserting weird annoying-to-parse markup elements mid-text as I've seen in Word documents (in the docx XML).

ChrisArchitect 4y ago

Textile. IYKYK But really it comes down to historically the time and place when it was needed and the power of momentum leading to its mass adoption.

Optimal_Persona 4y ago
I always thought Textile was the superior Betamax to Markdown's VHS, but John Gruber's popularity is what helped Markdown take over.

bborud 4y ago

Markdown is popular because it implements just enough features to be useful while not presenting a high threshold for "just writing things down". It exists because traditionally, people who design markup languages have not done a particularly good job in designing something that is suitable for adding a just enough structure to text to make it useful both as text and as rendered document. (If you want to look at a particularly egregious example of hubris, arrogance and total lack of empathy for users and implementors alike, look at ISO 8879:1986. The cheapest way is probably to get hold of an annotated standard is probably by buying Goldfarb's SGML Handbook. Please burn after reading though - to keep it out of the hands of impressionable kids) I had a long discussion about using HTML+CSS with one of the designers of CSS many moons ago, and sure, in theory we could have used that. But you need only do a "view source" on any web page you regularly visit to realize that it is anything but low threshold.

amai 4y ago

This seems to be another guy who doesn't know https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/.

amai 4y ago

When will hackernews support Markdown to it's comments?

tanseydavid 4y ago

My biggest attraction to Markdown has been avoiding ANY use of browser-based WYSIWYG editors. Multiple times the author asserts that people will resort to a WYSIWYG tool for some Markdown formatting. I expect this is largely true, but I can't be the only one who has sworn off WYSIWYG in the browser but it ends being so frustrating.

joernl 4y ago

I chose markdown for a large project due to the reduce storage size and forced simplicity and abstraction. I have to work with static data which will not change for 10 years, the only way to keep it alive is upcasting the internal structure and updating the conversion to html. The project lives in a scientific environment but is used by a wide variety of people. The project is now 5 years old and until next week there was no wysiwyg-editor (I'm currently working on it).

xigoi 4y ago
What kind of project is it that the storage size of text documents is a big deal? And why don't you use compression?
- joernl 4y ago
  It's an electronic testing and examination environment for German universities. It's very far from big data, but we have to support very small universities with very limited tech budget. We pre-generate and store the exams to ensure that we do not have any compatibility issues in the future (e.g. by changing minute elements of the randomisation). The biggest database currently is about 700GB and I assume that we'll reach an equilibrium at around 2 TB.

TrevorFSmith 4y ago

Any author that writes "it's a matter of simply deciding on a manageable subset of HTML and CSS and then calling it a standard" with a straight face may not understand the meaning of many of those words. Actual standardization (of the open web variety) is inherently hard. Nobody (and I do mean not one person) agrees with anyone else on which subsets of HTML and CSS are necessary. CommonMark exists: https://commonmark.org/ https://commonmark.org/

paultopia 4y ago

Currently finishing my third (full-length academic) book in markdown. Wrote the second book in markdown too. Wrote the first book in MS word. Never going back. Here's the thing. Word is a buggy bloated piece of shit application with an incomprehensible and ever-changing UI that requires 20 mouse clicks hunting through badly labeled menus to do anything. Latex is far too complicated for prose that doesn't have equations all in it, and is also unsupported by publishers outside of the sciences. Alternative word processors (OpenOffice, Pages, the desiccated shell of WordPerfect) are either buggy, ugly, unmaintained, lack critical features, or all of the above. So I just write in markdown in emacs. Markdown mode in emacs works very well, I have hardly any customizations on top. One file per chapter. References in zotero, insert citations in better bibtex. Compile it all in pandoc. When I want to revise I just concatenate the files and compile it to PDF and read my own work there. When I want to submit to a publisher I just compile it to word. I have a makefile that handles all of that for me. Then I make a few tiny tweaks in the garbage program and submit. This is the best workflow I've ever found for academic writing, because pandoc-enhanced markdown and better bibtex enhanced zotero give you everything you really need for academic writing (like control over reference formats), and nothing you don't need (endless nightmarish word bloat). And you can just store it all in a GitHub repo.

russellbeattie 4y ago

Heh. Author here. Not sure how I missed this since I'm on HN daily. Must have come and gone quick! I had no idea. I haven't seen this much rabid hysteria aimed at something I've written for a while! Nice. Given that I practically live here, it's not unexpected, but still... Wow.