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—I’d say it’s the other way around isn’t it? Wouldn’t Markdown be a subset of HTML, since all markdown can be expressed in HTML but not all HTML can be expresse
by graypegg 4y ago
—I’d say it’s the other way around isn’t it? Wouldn’t Markdown be a subset of HTML, since all markdown can be expressed in HTML but not all HTML can be expressed in Markdown?—
Edit: Markdown can contain HTML that gets meaningfully interpreted as markup as well.
I’d also say HTML is not difficult to write, even for someone new to the concept. I don’t think anyone making their GeoCities homepage was too strained learning HTML, and those were leagues more advanced than what’s possible with only Markdown!
If you want people to be excited about self-publishing online again, it’s probably best to start with the markup language that allows for some fun :)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- enos_feedler 4y agoIf say 10% of the pool of internet users at the time could make an HTML page on Geocities, what % of today’s pool of internet users could do it? The pool has gotten much larger and much less tech savvy on average.
- graypegg 4y agoWell I guess the next logical question is what % would not make an HTML page, but would make a Markdown page. I feel like the Venn diagram is nearly a circle, but I don’t have anything to back that up. To most people, symbols and words being “special” in some text = coding, I’m still not convinced that the cognitive load of: # my title Is different than <h1>my title</h1>
- enos_feedler 4y agoIts true. As another commenter said the baseline now is writing content into a social network and let it do all the work or use a GUI
- thih9 4y agoThen again, personal content is no longer shared via personal homepage but via Facebook/YouTube/TikTok/Medium/etc these days.
- pocketarc 4y agoAs far as I’m aware, you can write any HTML in Markdown, and it will be rendered normally. So Markdown can indeed contain any and all HTML. HTML can’t contain Markdown at all - a ### in HTML does nothing but a <strong>hello</strong> in Markdown does exactly what you expect it to.
- graypegg 4y agoOh I see, my mistake. Thanks!
- jbverschoor 4y agoSo you can't create a simple markdown rendered without creating a full-blown html/css renderer. So a cli renderer doesn't make sense either in that case. Html 'support' is just a hack for any shortcomings of markdown.
- masswerk 4y agoTo be fair, you can include Markdown inside script tags (assign a custom type like "text/markdown") and render this (the script's innerHTML) by another script.
- pdpi 4y agoIf you think about it in terms of syntax, then sure. Markdown is a superset of HTML. I think it's much more meaningful to compare their semantics instead. From that point of view, Markdown is a nicer, more human-readable syntax for a very small subset of html, plus an escape hatch to reach the rest of HTML using conventional syntax.
- barrucadu 4y agoA ### in Markdown doesn't "do" anything either, the reader just has to know that it denotes a 3rd level heading.
- Izkata 4y ago> As far as I’m aware, you can write any HTML in Markdown, and it will be rendered normally. It depends on your parser. Commonmark, for example, has rules for entering html mode: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#html-blocks https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#html-blocks Neither is truly a superset of the other.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoMarkdown allows you to just write HTML in it. That makes it a superset of HTML. HTML is not difficult to write, it's difficult to edit. A S-expression-based dialect of HTML (with macros!) would be fun.
- ncphillips 4y agoYou’ve got it backwards. Markdown is a superset of HTML. Markdown specific syntax is not valid in HTML pages, but all HTML is valid in Markdown.