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"The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be pub

"The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions." Ha! I've never read that, but having used Markdown quite a bit, they have entirely failed that goal. A Markdown document is parsable by a human, but it still looks like content surrounded by tag barf that failed to render.

Brendinooo 3y ago
Depends on what you're doing. If your content is just headings, bold/italic, and links, I think it's eminently readable. Code snippets are obviously niche but are a solved problem. People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, but I wonder how common of a use case that is for your average WYSIWYG user?
- psytrx 3y ago
  > I think it's eminently readable This. And proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored. > People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, ... IIRC, the "original" markdown does not include tables. They've been added by GitHub (I think), because it made sense for them, and many parsers started to adopt. I agree they are not easily readable in "source mode". It helps to properly align stuff, though, but it's a PITA.
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    > proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored. Documents that don't hard-wrap (they could opt to hard-wrap without consequence, to your point), when viewed somewhere that doesn't make it trivial to engage soft-wrap, are much more of an issue than the tag barf mentioned earlier, IMHO.
  - Brendinooo 3y ago
    Yeah. A lot of stuff was added later. The original spec was pretty loose, which is why CommonMark became a thing. See https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo... and linked previous blog posts if you (or anyone else reading this) are interested in the history.
nicbou 3y ago
I edit a markdown-based website for a living. I'd say that it works really well, but a proper text editor theme makes a big difference. I tweaked my Markdown theme to make headings bolder, links linkier, and blocks blockier. Sublime also collapses link URLs. This keeps the text very readable, while letting me edit text with powerful tools. There's a table of contents plugin, but Cmd + R is a much faster navigation tool.

Brendinooo 3y ago

Depends on what you're doing. If your content is just headings, bold/italic, and links, I think it's eminently readable. Code snippets are obviously niche but are a solved problem. People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, but I wonder how common of a use case that is for your average WYSIWYG user?

psytrx 3y ago
> I think it's eminently readable This. And proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored. > People have mentioned tables here, and...yeah, they're messy, ... IIRC, the "original" markdown does not include tables. They've been added by GitHub (I think), because it made sense for them, and many parsers started to adopt. I agree they are not easily readable in "source mode". It helps to properly align stuff, though, but it's a PITA.
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > proper line breaks help a lot, too. There's a reason single line breaks are ignored. Documents that don't hard-wrap (they could opt to hard-wrap without consequence, to your point), when viewed somewhere that doesn't make it trivial to engage soft-wrap, are much more of an issue than the tag barf mentioned earlier, IMHO.
- Brendinooo 3y ago
  Yeah. A lot of stuff was added later. The original spec was pretty loose, which is why CommonMark became a thing. See https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo... and linked previous blog posts if you (or anyone else reading this) are interested in the history.

nicbou 3y ago

I edit a markdown-based website for a living. I'd say that it works really well, but a proper text editor theme makes a big difference. I tweaked my Markdown theme to make headings bolder, links linkier, and blocks blockier. Sublime also collapses link URLs. This keeps the text very readable, while letting me edit text with powerful tools. There's a table of contents plugin, but Cmd + R is a much faster navigation tool.