3 ms·
> Writing <i>emphasis</i> 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 ea
by Lio 4y ago
> Writing <i>emphasis</i> 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.