3 ms·
> but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its sy
by eviks 2y ago
> but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax.
That's not true, even at the basics it's not great, let alone the best: asterisks/underlines for italics already require familiarity unlike the much more intuitive /italic slashes/
And then outside the basics it's not that easy to write/read either, you'll get lost in bad formatting of tables or metadata (tags) obscuring text or what not without proper tooling
> How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant
It is relevant as then you could fix those basics if you could easily and conveniently extend it
- michaelcampbell 2y ago> asterisks/underlines for italics already require familiarity unlike the much more intuitive /italic slashes/ This has always baffled me. _underline_, /italics/, bold.
- yencabulator 2y agoAnd then you have programmers talking about _private_method and /some/path/
- eviks 2y agonot a good argument given the fact that underscore _is_ already a bold markdown syntax
- yencabulator 2y agoYeah but CommonMark was carefully specced to make sure _foo_bar doesn't trigger that, and _foo_ is not a common style of identifiers -- where as /etc/ is a common convention, when you specifically want to refer to contents of a directory.
- eviks 2y agoIf it's so carefully specced (though how do you italicize a part of a word than? Seems to me more commonly important vs some niche identifiers), why did you bring _ up as an issue? But also asterisk is a common form for multiplication just like / is for division/separation (which is more common than paths) So you already have this design issue, but on the other hand at least you could have the benefit of visually intuitive markup, which isn't the case with markdown
- yencabulator 2y agoCommonMark behaves differently for _foo_bar and *foo*bar. https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/?text=_foo_bar%0A%0A*foo*bar%0A https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/?text=_foo_bar%0A%0A*foo*... Multiple multiplication signs can be used with spaces, x * y * z. Markdown makes no mention of italics. It speaks of emphasis and strong emphasis. Underscore and asterisk are interchangeable, doubling gets the strong variant. Using slashes for italics doesn't fit into that scheme.
- eviks 2y agoOh, so you meant that if _ were underlines, then you couldn't have this special case because you wouldn't have two symbols to play with and have different behavior for? Yeah, I'm fine with that, it's a bad original design decision to waste two symbols for the same thing in the first place, and the subtle _foo_bar vs foobar differences go against the simple nature of the markup All these _foo_bar intricacies should be dealt with via escaping (or an even better alternative design of using some other marker types like _[] to allow free use of the marks) > Using slashes for italics doesn't fit into that scheme Sure, because that's a bad scheme, and not mentioning such a common thing as italics doesn't help either since the whole point is visual intuitiveness, so markdown still fails here (and adds a needless cost of 2 extra symbols "for the strength") > Underscore and asterisk are interchangeable, doubling gets the strong variant. But you've just shown that they aren't
- yencabulator 2y ago
- michaelcampbell 2y agoThen put code things in `grave_marks`, etc.