3 ms·
Markdown is undoubtedly more readable, but HTML can be more readable than most people make it. And considering that the ultimate goal is to wind up with a layed
by ElemenoPicuares 4y ago
Markdown is undoubtedly more readable, but HTML can be more readable than most people make it. And considering that the ultimate goal is to wind up with a layed-out, styled document, its capabilities in that regard are just plain-old more important, especially since markdown isn't going to replace WYSIWYG editors any time soon, and almost everybody who needs to know HTML can learn it relatively easily. Browsers collapse white space by default, so you've got a lot of flexibility with its formatting:
<!doctype html>
<title>
Page Title
</title>
<h1>
Page Title
</h1>
<p>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa
euismod vestibulum.
<p>
Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a
varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel
vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.
--or--
<!doctype html>
<title> Page Title </title>
<h1> Page Title </h1>
<p> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur
adipiscing elit. Ut ac lorem ut massa
euismod vestibulum.
<p> Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a
varius diam. Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel
vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.
I get why many developers like this idea... Web developers are responsible for implementing the complex user-facing parts, and their primary weapon is text: doing extra work sucks, and when you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But developers are not designers, and design not being left to developers in mature organizations is no accident. Absolute, deliberate, limiting simplicity is always an attractive argument if you dismiss the value of, or maybe don't even understand the reason for the complexity. I won't deny the advantages of reader-view-level simplicity in web design: it's easier to visually parse, more performant, and easier to navigate compared to most web pages, similar to how books compare to magazines-- but about 225 million people per year in the US read magazines and I assure you most of them would not choose to have textural printouts in lieu of their current form. While people like having the option of a uniform, grey, easily visually parseable mode to view webpages, that's probably not what they want even most of the time, let alone as a deliberate limitation.
- robinsonb5 4y agoI may be that rare exception - a hobbyist developer who does design work as part of $dayjob.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y agoI don't think that's as rare as people say, especially in smaller organizations. Having an art school design education and a bit over a decade in (mostly back-end) web development, I've had plenty of deseloper type roles. If they fall under a design or marketing department, they'll spend 80% of the time doing design work and try to throw it together on some shitty wysiwyg monstrosity, ignoring performance, stability, maintainability, etc. If they fall under technical departments, design, ahem, decoration and polish is something to be applied at the end, if there's time, after the real work is done. Either way, having the same group of people responsible for two halves of that coin rarely yields a good balance, and they almost never pay any real attention to usability ... at least not for use cases that don't exactly mirror their own. Seems to me that replacing the flexibility of current markup and styling tools with simple markdown and reader-type layouts is just trying to apply the tech-focused solution to the entire problem the way Flash tried to do the opposite.
- nerdponx 4y agoThe problem is that this only really works well for "documents". Most webpages are anything but "documents", even those that do mostly focus on text. Of course, HTML templating can help a lot with that: adding footers and sidebars and so on. But it's still no good for "web apps".
- ElemenoPicuares 4y agoCompared to markdown I think HTML works a lot better as a general purpose format.
- account42 4y agoOne problem with this style is that if you copy any text from this website you will have trailing spaces after each paragraph. To avoid that you have to close the tags (or open the next one) directly after the text.
- ElemenoPicuares 4y agoSure, if a trailing space in copied/paste functionality or precise :after placement is important then you'd need to modify the ending tag placement... but prioritizing that use case seems like a premature optimization. I don't think that makes a drastic difference. Compared to markdown, you've still got a heck of a lot more formatting flexibility without changing the rendered product.