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> 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 alternati

> 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 emphasis 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.
Lio 4y ago
> Writing emphasis is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted. Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
 > Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time. I'm a big fan of this as well; another huge upshot is that you can write the documentation at the same time as the code and bring it along during the code review.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
 > The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. And this is the whole point of markdown. It’s for the source version to accurately represent what the output document would show. So emphasis isn’t just a tag. It’s represented by surrounding text with *s, which shows emphasis even in the source document. A URL is easy once you understand that you read the stuff in the [] and mentally ignore the stuff in (). The point of markdown is not to transform it into HTML. The point of Markdown is to be able to write a plain text document which is sufficient on its own. The fact that it can be transformed into an HTML output is a bonus (although a planned one). In a sense this idea is conveyed in the name itself. It’s the opposite of markup, in that the markup symbols aren’t intended to be separate from the content but are part of the content itself.
rhdunn 4y ago
I recall one of the Ars Technica journalists saying that they use markdown when writing their articles. Even things like Twine (interactive fiction text adventures) have a Markdown-like syntax.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there. Every time someone tries to do a list (eg cooking recipes) they fail hard, because both the need to have a two newlines for a one newline and a unnumbered list for a numbered list is thing which surely is out of knowledge of Average Joe. Even consulting a help doesn't help sometimes. "New" Reddit solved it by having a WYSIWYG editor, but even then things get out of hand sometimes.
prepend 4y ago
I agree and have had success teaching job-devs to use and even create markdown files for project documentation and stuff like that. It’s also frequently coupled with “learning git” and I’ve found it helpful in governance processes where someone needs to approve or make sight revisions to something before approval. It’s better than signing word documents and emailing them around.

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.

Lio 4y ago

> Writing emphasis is just too distracting compared to *emphasis*; The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. I'd be happy with another plain text ASCII format but Mardown just happens to be the one that's been widely adopted. Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time.

Beltalowda 4y ago
> Being able to keep documents in the same version control system as your code is also a useful tool IMHO. I hate it when management insists on keeping documentation in something like Confluence. If checkout an old version of the code I want a matching old version of the documentation from that time. I'm a big fan of this as well; another huge upshot is that you can write the documentation at the same time as the code and bring it along during the code review.
rhaway84773 4y ago
> The big thing for me is that Markdown is not just quick to touch-type but also is easy to read in plain text documents. I can easily infer what the formatting means when reading Markdown even without learning it. And this is the whole point of markdown. It’s for the source version to accurately represent what the output document would show. So emphasis isn’t just a tag. It’s represented by surrounding text with *s, which shows emphasis even in the source document. A URL is easy once you understand that you read the stuff in the [] and mentally ignore the stuff in (). The point of markdown is not to transform it into HTML. The point of Markdown is to be able to write a plain text document which is sufficient on its own. The fact that it can be transformed into an HTML output is a bonus (although a planned one). In a sense this idea is conveyed in the name itself. It’s the opposite of markup, in that the markup symbols aren’t intended to be separate from the content but are part of the content itself.

rhdunn 4y ago

I recall one of the Ars Technica journalists saying that they use markdown when writing their articles. Even things like Twine (interactive fiction text adventures) have a Markdown-like syntax.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

> While the Reddit userbase does skew somewhat towards the tech-y, there's also loads of non-tech folks on there. Every time someone tries to do a list (eg cooking recipes) they fail hard, because both the need to have a two newlines for a one newline and a unnumbered list for a numbered list is thing which surely is out of knowledge of Average Joe. Even consulting a help doesn't help sometimes. "New" Reddit solved it by having a WYSIWYG editor, but even then things get out of hand sometimes.

prepend 4y ago

I agree and have had success teaching job-devs to use and even create markdown files for project documentation and stuff like that. It’s also frequently coupled with “learning git” and I’ve found it helpful in governance processes where someone needs to approve or make sight revisions to something before approval. It’s better than signing word documents and emailing them around.