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Markdown is like a virus of an idea: 1. Apparently simple enough to implement to get the basics right (not that I could do it) 2. But there is plenty of room

Markdown is like a virus of an idea: 1. Apparently simple enough to implement to get the basics right (not that I could do it) 2. But there is plenty of room for accidental edge cases in the implementation 3. Many then implement it with or without edge cases 4. But it’s not enough because a lot of the people who use it are programmers so they naturally want to extend it to do just a little more 5. Now the standardization effort (Commonmark) has to take all of those edge cases into account plus have to figure out how to deal with extensions (especially for popular ones) 6. Then you get a heroically (in terms of effort and grit) wordy standard All for the initial idea which is so simple that it seems redundant: look as good plain as rendered. (Then what’s the point of rendering it, and in turn what’s the point of a formal syntax instead of the (still existing) ad hoc email and whatnot conventions?) Right now it’s fantastic for chat applications (here you definitely want rendering and not the visible markup). It’s been pretty good for things like forum comments as well. With the exception of block quotes which are a pain to fiddle with (the only prefix syntax if you don’t include the indentation-for-code since that is de facto optional now that so many applications support code fences… all because that’s how email does it).

bitwize 2y ago
Markdown is the Unix of rich text formats.
- gm3dmo 2y ago
  Ready for Markdown wars?
  - bitwize 2y ago
    You mean like original recipe vs. GitHub flavor vs. Reddit flavor vs. CommonMark? We're already there, dude.
cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
To be fair, John Gruber offered up a completely deficient “standard” and a buggy as hell Perl parser implementation. Yet still wears “I created markdown” as a feather in his cap, strongly insists to this day that it was a good idea, and says “the canonical markdown docs are on my blog! Nothing else is markdown!” Things like CommonMark were absolutely integral to Markdown’s current success. It was way more about fixing John’s mistakes than adding more functionality.
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  But nobody (relatively speaking) uses CommonMark, and everyone uses Markdown
  - input_sh 2y ago
    They're not separate things, but a more consistent implementation of the original idea. GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Stack Exchange... they're all adhering to CommonMark specification, not the original Markdown specification.
billti 2y ago
The hours I spent chasing down the edge cases with inline html! There’s some real nuance to the spec there. You need inline html fairly often for anything non-trivial, and some of the rules certainly aren’t intuitive or easy to remember. That said, like JSON, it won by being both simple to grok and good enough for most use cases.
deathanatos 2y ago
> 3. Many then implement it with or without edge cases > it’s fantastic for chat applications Slack is the absolute worst at it; I am unable to at all figure out what its "parser" (which feels like cobbled together regexes … but even then … not?) is doing. [link text](URL) is sometimes a link. But sometimes not! Sometimes Slack mutates your message, and then renders the mutated version — and this is visible if you subsequently edit your message, as what is now there != what you type. When it works it is nice, but when Slack decides it doesn't like that message, in particular, it can just be a pain to get it to do what you've typed. Worse to me is that Slack considers "we mutated the input you typed, and then proceeded to misrender it" as "Won't Fix/Working As Intended". (I reported it a while ago, that was the resolution.)
- m-p-3 2y ago
 Google Chat is also somewhat terrible at it. Want to italicize some text? Easy right, just do it like *this*.. nope that will bake it BOLD, gotta write it like _this_ for italics. https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7649118 https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7649118 The only thing I like is that you can colorize text, but there's no syntax for it, you gotta highlight it then choose a color in the formatting toolbar. It's annoying to no end when you memorized the syntax and Google decides to not even follow it.
 - deathanatos 2y ago
 Way back in the day when I was on IRC, I usually read them as, *bold* /italics/ _underline_ … which would have made sense, if you stop to think about the characters. (But of course humans are wibbly-wobbly in what they'll choose, so context is context.) Alas, bold is now different in everything, it seems, and I can never remember which is which, aside from Discord which gives visual feedback.
 - account42 2y ago
 And even HTML was not safe because and were too easy so now we have and because somehow those are more meaningful.
strken 2y ago
> All for the initial idea which is so simple that it seems redundant: look as good plain as rendered. (Then what’s the point of rendering it, and in turn what’s the point of a formal syntax instead of the (still existing) ad hoc email and whatnot conventions?) It's intended to look as good as possible in both mediums. It is not possible for the raw text to look as good as the rendered text and still be easily writeable, because the raw text cannot generate visual hierarchy using font size and weight. I suspect you know this, but when you say readable raw text seems like a redundant idea, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
- keybored 2y ago
  > I suspect you know this, but when you say readable raw text seems like a redundant idea, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I was referring to the sentiment that “MD looks so good that I might never even render it”.

bitwize 2y ago

Markdown is the Unix of rich text formats.

gm3dmo 2y ago
Ready for Markdown wars?
- bitwize 2y ago
  You mean like original recipe vs. GitHub flavor vs. Reddit flavor vs. CommonMark? We're already there, dude.

cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago

To be fair, John Gruber offered up a completely deficient “standard” and a buggy as hell Perl parser implementation. Yet still wears “I created markdown” as a feather in his cap, strongly insists to this day that it was a good idea, and says “the canonical markdown docs are on my blog! Nothing else is markdown!” Things like CommonMark were absolutely integral to Markdown’s current success. It was way more about fixing John’s mistakes than adding more functionality.

KerrAvon 2y ago
But nobody (relatively speaking) uses CommonMark, and everyone uses Markdown
- input_sh 2y ago
  They're not separate things, but a more consistent implementation of the original idea. GitHub, GitLab, Reddit, Stack Exchange... they're all adhering to CommonMark specification, not the original Markdown specification.

billti 2y ago

The hours I spent chasing down the edge cases with inline html! There’s some real nuance to the spec there. You need inline html fairly often for anything non-trivial, and some of the rules certainly aren’t intuitive or easy to remember. That said, like JSON, it won by being both simple to grok and good enough for most use cases.

deathanatos 2y ago

> 3. Many then implement it with or without edge cases > it’s fantastic for chat applications Slack is the absolute worst at it; I am unable to at all figure out what its "parser" (which feels like cobbled together regexes … but even then … not?) is doing. [link text](URL) is sometimes a link. But sometimes not! Sometimes Slack mutates your message, and then renders the mutated version — and this is visible if you subsequently edit your message, as what is now there != what you type. When it works it is nice, but when Slack decides it doesn't like that message, in particular, it can just be a pain to get it to do what you've typed. Worse to me is that Slack considers "we mutated the input you typed, and then proceeded to misrender it" as "Won't Fix/Working As Intended". (I reported it a while ago, that was the resolution.)

m-p-3 2y ago
Google Chat is also somewhat terrible at it. Want to italicize some text? Easy right, just do it like *this*.. nope that will bake it BOLD, gotta write it like _this_ for italics. https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7649118 https://support.google.com/chat/answer/7649118 The only thing I like is that you can colorize text, but there's no syntax for it, you gotta highlight it then choose a color in the formatting toolbar. It's annoying to no end when you memorized the syntax and Google decides to not even follow it.
- deathanatos 2y ago
 Way back in the day when I was on IRC, I usually read them as, *bold* /italics/ _underline_ … which would have made sense, if you stop to think about the characters. (But of course humans are wibbly-wobbly in what they'll choose, so context is context.) Alas, bold is now different in everything, it seems, and I can never remember which is which, aside from Discord which gives visual feedback.
 - account42 2y ago
 And even HTML was not safe because and were too easy so now we have and because somehow those are more meaningful.

strken 2y ago

> All for the initial idea which is so simple that it seems redundant: look as good plain as rendered. (Then what’s the point of rendering it, and in turn what’s the point of a formal syntax instead of the (still existing) ad hoc email and whatnot conventions?) It's intended to look as good as possible in both mediums. It is not possible for the raw text to look as good as the rendered text and still be easily writeable, because the raw text cannot generate visual hierarchy using font size and weight. I suspect you know this, but when you say readable raw text seems like a redundant idea, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.

keybored 2y ago
> I suspect you know this, but when you say readable raw text seems like a redundant idea, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. I was referring to the sentiment that “MD looks so good that I might never even render it”.