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Uh, yeah, that's a valid web-page, but I don't see how that counters "html is cluttered" statement. This is cluttered. It… just is. I know some people who suffe

by krick 4y ago

Uh, yeah, that's a valid web-page, but I don't see how that counters "html is cluttered" statement. This is cluttered. It… just is. I know some people who suffered some mind deformation in academia and now claim LaTeX is the perfect markup for blogs, but I don't think I've encountered the same for html until now. I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?! Markdown is deeply limited, that's true, but I often think that there is just a tiny bit of syntax lacking to make it just fine. Some actually is implemented in software like Pandoc or RedCarpet, there are a couple of ways to make tables (some better than others), LaTeX can be employed for formulas, some implementations have checklists, strikethrough, etc. It's just poorly standartized — and the spirit of original proposal (and misleading name) is at fault here as well, since later attempts to invent a standard mean very little when there is a dozen of different common implementations and not a single one is reasonably complete. By the way, the fact that HTML was supposed to serve as an addition to Markdown doesn't help: you just cannot allow people to submit arbitrary HTML everywhere where something like Markdown is needed. To use it in comments on a forum you need to fully parse it anyway, explicitly enabling or disabling different features of some ubiquitous "full implementation". Obviously, you cannot make an atrocity like a modern landing page in Markdown+. But… ok, I shouldn't be judgemental and claim such atrocities shouldn't exist — they can, but most blogs, forums (such as this one), etc. — really could have been just "viewer programs" of some standardized format, much more restrictive than HTML+CSS+JS, but a little less limited than Markdown. All of this isn't very much related to the original topic, but seriously, I dream of some better version of Markdown someday becoming a de-facto standard markup language for all forums, messengers, blogging engines, whatever the general name for Jira is… You know what I mean. I don't really have a solution, it just really feels like there shouldn't be that many additional features. A couple more of emphasis options, a couple less ways to do the same thing (I mean, it's stupid to convert all of */-/+ to the same <li> elements), colors, better image embeddings (with captions), sidenotes, better ways to handle formulas (there are enough dedicated literals in Unicode to construct most simple formulas without the need for LaTeX, but they still need to be parsed to be rendered pretty) and simple UML-like stuff… I'm pretty sure the comprehensive list of features for 6-σ usecases cannot be THAT huge. Big, yes. Not endless. And most features surely have some "plain-text" (or very light special syntax) representations. I realize that it was pretty much the intention behind HTML + CSS. But HTML + CSS stopped being that a very, very long time ago. 30 years have passed. By now, we should have a little better sense of what's needed to write & render most texts.

MrVandemar 4y ago
> I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?! Yes. I use HTML the way people use markdown: as an open, easy to read, easy to write, plain text format for taking notes, writing articles, etc. I find this quite intuitive and easy – partly because I’m an old-school web-developer from days of yore and I have HTML deeply internalised; partly because I use the abbreviated version of HTML noted above; and partly because I use a VIM plugin called Emmet which allows you to construct complex HTML fragments with a basic shorthand. The reason why I use HTML instead of markdown is threefold. * The first is that simple HTML, written with a little care, is readable as-is, and requires no transformation to see it looking pretty (just open in a browser). Markdown requires pandoc to turn it into something else. * The second is that it is a semantically rich language, full of useful tags for expressing document structure and context for words and sentences. I find Markdown really confining. * The third reason is that, if I take the care to fill in the basic author/keyword/desc meta-tags I can run scripts over my directories looking for and indexing things. Who cares Search Engines don’t use some of those tags anymore. I do. Possibly they’re not entirely compelling reasons for anyone else to adopt HTML over markdown, but they work for me.
fiedzia 4y ago
> it just really feels like there shouldn't be that many additional features. A couple more of emphasis options, a couple less ways to do the same thing There was a language like that once, it was called HTML. It had very basic set of features initially, but then someone needed text to blink, someone needed to display videos, someone needed to send forms, someone needed to use it to play games and here we are today, and it's not done yet. If it was implemented today, you will get exactly same result in near future, because everyone's "small set of features" together adds to infinity.

by krick 4y ago

MrVandemar 4y ago

> I mean, does somebody really compose text in html?! Yes. I use HTML the way people use markdown: as an open, easy to read, easy to write, plain text format for taking notes, writing articles, etc. I find this quite intuitive and easy – partly because I’m an old-school web-developer from days of yore and I have HTML deeply internalised; partly because I use the abbreviated version of HTML noted above; and partly because I use a VIM plugin called Emmet which allows you to construct complex HTML fragments with a basic shorthand. The reason why I use HTML instead of markdown is threefold. * The first is that simple HTML, written with a little care, is readable as-is, and requires no transformation to see it looking pretty (just open in a browser). Markdown requires pandoc to turn it into something else. * The second is that it is a semantically rich language, full of useful tags for expressing document structure and context for words and sentences. I find Markdown really confining. * The third reason is that, if I take the care to fill in the basic author/keyword/desc meta-tags I can run scripts over my directories looking for and indexing things. Who cares Search Engines don’t use some of those tags anymore. I do. Possibly they’re not entirely compelling reasons for anyone else to adopt HTML over markdown, but they work for me.

fiedzia 4y ago

> it just really feels like there shouldn't be that many additional features. A couple more of emphasis options, a couple less ways to do the same thing There was a language like that once, it was called HTML. It had very basic set of features initially, but then someone needed text to blink, someone needed to display videos, someone needed to send forms, someone needed to use it to play games and here we are today, and it's not done yet. If it was implemented today, you will get exactly same result in near future, because everyone's "small set of features" together adds to infinity.