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Seeing a GUI editor for markdown when there's also XML under the hood, I'm expecting it's a matter of time until they "pull a Confluence" and shift away from en

Seeing a GUI editor for markdown when there's also XML under the hood, I'm expecting it's a matter of time until they "pull a Confluence" and shift away from end-to-end lightweight markup eventually, providing it only at the time of typing as a comfort editing experience or even key binding and convert it into XML immediately. That's because, unlike SGML, its offspring XML lacks (ie. deliberately didn't include for simplicity of implementation) integral support for lightweight markup, to only later re-introduce it, awkwardly or in an ad-hoc or hardcoded fashion. As much as XML might make sense as a canonical profile of SGML for archival or delivery, using is as an authoring format forcing users to dutifully close elements and input other redundant and excessive boilerplate the markup language can figure out itself is brutal and no progress. And has also clearly failed despite decades of forcing it on the web, where SGML remains the only formal markup meta-language capable to describe HTML, even post HTML 4.

_the_inflator 3y ago
I had exactly the same thought. Almost everything starts "lightweight", limited, easy to handle and use syntax, short but expressive - until you add feature by feature to it, and voila end up building tools on top of your tool. From a business perspective Jetbrains is doomed to follow this path, since they wanna make money, they have to lure you into their ecosystem and make switching to other solutions as hard as possible. Also they have to add feature by feature just to simulate progress. There is some magic in simply sticking to one system and never change, say MD. It has its limitations, but this is true for everything. JetBrains' tool looks promising, but I fear it will be a creepy mess in 5 years from now.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  I have seen this movie before, when Borland thought they couldn't go further with Delphi and C++ Builder, bought a company in SDLC/ALM space, and then Imprise came to be. JetBrains trying to go everywhere, and also trying to push Kotlin outside the JVM ecosystem, kind of brings memories back.

_the_inflator 3y ago

I had exactly the same thought. Almost everything starts "lightweight", limited, easy to handle and use syntax, short but expressive - until you add feature by feature to it, and voila end up building tools on top of your tool. From a business perspective Jetbrains is doomed to follow this path, since they wanna make money, they have to lure you into their ecosystem and make switching to other solutions as hard as possible. Also they have to add feature by feature just to simulate progress. There is some magic in simply sticking to one system and never change, say MD. It has its limitations, but this is true for everything. JetBrains' tool looks promising, but I fear it will be a creepy mess in 5 years from now.

pjmlp 3y ago
I have seen this movie before, when Borland thought they couldn't go further with Delphi and C++ Builder, bought a company in SDLC/ALM space, and then Imprise came to be. JetBrains trying to go everywhere, and also trying to push Kotlin outside the JVM ecosystem, kind of brings memories back.