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The main point of Markdown is that it has a very important feature that other languages don't have: it's supported in a lot of places. Most of the alternatives

The main point of Markdown is that it has a very important feature that other languages don't have: it's supported in a lot of places. Most of the alternatives mentioned in this thread or in the article are things that require custom tools, that can't be used in most of the places that currently do support markdown. It's common in a lot of places. Even Google Docs has a well hidden feature that allows you to paste markdown. It's one of those good enough things where the things it doesn't do are outweighed by the notion that you can just use it pretty much everywhere. It's a Betamax vs VHS type discussion (both are at this point obsolete and forgotten). HTML used to be pretty limited as well compared to things like SGML or any of the wonderful things people used for structured documentation in the eighties. Most of which are long forgotten. It still is pretty limited compared to those probably. But the point with HTML is that that's what browsers supported and not other formats. Many of the limitations were addressed over time. Markdown could be improved in a similar way over time. We have ambiguous standardization, lack of features, mutually incompatible implementations, etc. The whole thing actually resembles HTML4 before people started addressing such concerns. Evolving Markdown seems like the easier path than replacing it with something else.

zdc1 11mo ago
Yeah, I don't see the point of this article: Markdown has already won. I have some clients where I will send docs in MS Word/PDF format, but that kind of proves the point: the recipient sets the format. They may not explicitly say anything, but I'm not going to send something if there's a risk of receiving a "how do I open this?" Also, code blocks are the worst example of it's limitations: just use backticks. Sometimes I want to have a big table or diagram and find that Markdown (/Obsidian) doesn't quite scratch my itch, but then there's always HTML...
- ohboyhereitgoes 11mo ago
  [dead]
- QQ00 11mo ago
  What sorts of limitations you have with Obsidian? for diagrams I use Mermaid and it's work flawlessly within Obsidian. For anything fancy, advanced and customized, I use Obsidian Canvas, it's a new feature they released recently. So far, I don't need anything outside Obsidian to do any kind of note taking/writing.
zelphirkalt 11mo ago
While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't. I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been extended. Markdown does not have a systematic syntax like HTML does. It is not parser and machine friendly. It may be human friendly, but that doesn't make it easy to extend. In HTML on the other hand, one could, theoretically, just come up with a new tag name and introduce a new tag. Mind, we are talking about using both formats for writing a document. Of course Markdown doesn't have the same burden of already being the workhorse of the web and being directly interpreted by browser rendering engines. That however is an aspect that resides outside of the actual format considerations. We already got tons of Markdown dialects and most of them don't gain particularly much traction, because they are only supported in niche tools. The only one of them that could be considered standard is maybe common mark, with its extensive test suite. Specialized ones like Pandoc Markdown for writing papers exist, but will most likely never leave their niche. What I could imagine is, that maybe the changes from dialect to dialect could be outsourced into "extensions" and then one would need to pick "syntax conflict free" extensions. But since the format itself is kind of ad-hoc, and not systematic like HTML with its tags, it seems also unlikely, that such an extension system would work well.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- hananova 11mo ago
  But markdown does not require custom tools. The entire point of md is that you CAN use a renderer to make it pretty, but just reading the raw text in a text editor also works just fine.
  - zelphirkalt 11mo ago
    Same can be said about reStructuredText, AsciiDoc and many more.
coffeefirst 11mo ago
The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card. Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom. On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters. I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.
- hinkley 11mo ago
  The whole point is to dumb a problem down so that people can focus on substance instead of form. It’s typesetting for people who aren’t technical and to lower the barrier for technical people for documentation of what they’re working on so far that you can ridicule people who still refuse to document their shit. Any time you can make a developer chose between belligerence or stupidity to explain their behavior, they will either change the behavior or go with belligerence because they’d rather be dead than thought stupid. In either case you have maneuvered them out of being able to continue to be obstructive to team dynamics. So you “solve” social problems with technical solutions not by making the solution better, but by making it the dumbest thing ever so only an idiot wouldn’t understand it.
  - SR2Z 11mo ago
    It's not even typesetting. It just formalizes the semantic parts of any well written long document. It holds people back because it's not meant to be a typesetting tool. It's mostly meant to look good in its raw format.
    - hinkley 11mo ago
      It’s called markdown because it contains simple markup. Some of that is structural, no argument, but it’s also layout. Just enough to keep readers on board with what you’re saying.
ivanjermakov 11mo ago
Important and often underlooked feature of markdown is that it's very readable as plain text. A lot easier to read than say latex or html. I like to think of markdown as a high level markup language that gets compiled down to html. There is always a fallback to write html directly in markdown.
- kiicia 11mo ago
  It was always THE main feature, that you can have something from both worlds in a win-win scenario. I don’t understand why someone would invent new html instead of appreciating markdown for it’s elegant simplicity
thayne 11mo ago
> Markdown could be improved in a similar way over time I think that is unlikely to happen any time soon. The problem is there isn't any kind of authority that can improve it. The closest we have is commonmark, which is more of a deacriptive specification rather than prescriptive.
- giobox 11mo ago
  The inventor of markdown, John Gruber (yes that John Gruber of daringfireball fame) has always distanced himself from any efforts to make it a "standard" too, in part why we ended up with the name "CommonMark" for that project... > https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ > https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

zdc1 11mo ago

Yeah, I don't see the point of this article: Markdown has already won. I have some clients where I will send docs in MS Word/PDF format, but that kind of proves the point: the recipient sets the format. They may not explicitly say anything, but I'm not going to send something if there's a risk of receiving a "how do I open this?" Also, code blocks are the worst example of it's limitations: just use backticks. Sometimes I want to have a big table or diagram and find that Markdown (/Obsidian) doesn't quite scratch my itch, but then there's always HTML...

ohboyhereitgoes 11mo ago
[dead]
QQ00 11mo ago
What sorts of limitations you have with Obsidian? for diagrams I use Mermaid and it's work flawlessly within Obsidian. For anything fancy, advanced and customized, I use Obsidian Canvas, it's a new feature they released recently. So far, I don't need anything outside Obsidian to do any kind of note taking/writing.

zelphirkalt 11mo ago

While it is true, that Markdown is available in more places, it is also true, that it as well "requires custom tools". Just that those tools already got put in place by people developing things. There is no technical reason keeping developers from supporting other languages as well. It's more of a social issue, that they don't. I also doubt, that Markdown will be able to be extended with the same "ease" HTML has been extended. Markdown does not have a systematic syntax like HTML does. It is not parser and machine friendly. It may be human friendly, but that doesn't make it easy to extend. In HTML on the other hand, one could, theoretically, just come up with a new tag name and introduce a new tag. Mind, we are talking about using both formats for writing a document. Of course Markdown doesn't have the same burden of already being the workhorse of the web and being directly interpreted by browser rendering engines. That however is an aspect that resides outside of the actual format considerations. We already got tons of Markdown dialects and most of them don't gain particularly much traction, because they are only supported in niche tools. The only one of them that could be considered standard is maybe common mark, with its extensive test suite. Specialized ones like Pandoc Markdown for writing papers exist, but will most likely never leave their niche. What I could imagine is, that maybe the changes from dialect to dialect could be outsourced into "extensions" and then one would need to pick "syntax conflict free" extensions. But since the format itself is kind of ad-hoc, and not systematic like HTML with its tags, it seems also unlikely, that such an extension system would work well.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
hananova 11mo ago
But markdown does not require custom tools. The entire point of md is that you CAN use a renderer to make it pretty, but just reading the raw text in a text editor also works just fine.
- zelphirkalt 11mo ago
  Same can be said about reStructuredText, AsciiDoc and many more.

coffeefirst 11mo ago

The other major feature is anyone can learn it in 5 minutes and fit all the instructions on an index card. Many years ago I introduced it at a newspaper full of OG reporters who were a little nostalgic for the clatter of typewriters and the kid who would run the drafts around the newsroom. On the first day they thought it was weird. On the second—and I'm not exaggerating, it was 24 hours—they loved it, because unlike MS Word/most WYSIWYG junkers, it did exactly what they told it to, without fussy formatting or invisible characters. I've done this several times since, with all kinds of non-technical users who would never, ever tolerate something like LaTeX.

hinkley 11mo ago
The whole point is to dumb a problem down so that people can focus on substance instead of form. It’s typesetting for people who aren’t technical and to lower the barrier for technical people for documentation of what they’re working on so far that you can ridicule people who still refuse to document their shit. Any time you can make a developer chose between belligerence or stupidity to explain their behavior, they will either change the behavior or go with belligerence because they’d rather be dead than thought stupid. In either case you have maneuvered them out of being able to continue to be obstructive to team dynamics. So you “solve” social problems with technical solutions not by making the solution better, but by making it the dumbest thing ever so only an idiot wouldn’t understand it.
- SR2Z 11mo ago
  It's not even typesetting. It just formalizes the semantic parts of any well written long document. It holds people back because it's not meant to be a typesetting tool. It's mostly meant to look good in its raw format.
  - hinkley 11mo ago
    It’s called markdown because it contains simple markup. Some of that is structural, no argument, but it’s also layout. Just enough to keep readers on board with what you’re saying.

ivanjermakov 11mo ago

Important and often underlooked feature of markdown is that it's very readable as plain text. A lot easier to read than say latex or html. I like to think of markdown as a high level markup language that gets compiled down to html. There is always a fallback to write html directly in markdown.

kiicia 11mo ago
It was always THE main feature, that you can have something from both worlds in a win-win scenario. I don’t understand why someone would invent new html instead of appreciating markdown for it’s elegant simplicity

thayne 11mo ago

> Markdown could be improved in a similar way over time I think that is unlikely to happen any time soon. The problem is there isn't any kind of authority that can improve it. The closest we have is commonmark, which is more of a deacriptive specification rather than prescriptive.

giobox 11mo ago
The inventor of markdown, John Gruber (yes that John Gruber of daringfireball fame) has always distanced himself from any efforts to make it a "standard" too, in part why we ended up with the name "CommonMark" for that project... > https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ > https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-common-markdown/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...