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lol this is a great wording for something I've not been able to express before I sometimes wonder... is it Markdown's specification chaos the reason for its su

lol this is a great wording for something I've not been able to express before I sometimes wonder... is it Markdown's specification chaos the reason for its success? Maybe it was just barely enough spec to be usable but also small enough to allow anyone to make an implementation that seemed right. No qualifications to fail. Thus, it proliferated. The xkcd[1] problem is a darn shame, though. At least CommonMark exists for people who want to point to a "Standard" [1] https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

TimorousBestie 9mo ago
Markdown is definitely a case of “worse is better” and it helped that it was half-canonicalizing ASCII formatting workarounds that had been in common use for decades.
- chrismorgan 9mo ago
  … except its link syntax. That is an abomination that had never existed and should never have existed.
  - PaulHoule 9mo ago
    My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it. It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1] [1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
  - dpark 9mo ago
    What’s wrong with the link syntax and what would an alternative be?
    - evnp 9mo ago
      Anything that doesn't force you to remember arbitrary ordering - square brackets first? Or parentheses? It's the textual equivalent of plugging in usb upside down. An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.
      - setopt 9mo ago
        > An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link. For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).
        evnp 9mo ago
        This is great! Not an emacs user (as yet) but this and org-mode's /italic/ _underline_ *bold* +strike+ feel that much closer to the oft-touted "source looks kinda like formatting” ideal of markdown. Not sure why we ended up with the mediocre version as a defacto standard.
        macintux 9mo ago
        The only keyboard shortcut for org-mode and markdown-mode I consistently remember is C-c C-l for inserting links. Much easier to remember that than to remember the syntax, and the fact that both modes use the same easy-to-remember shortcut is a major win.
        setopt 9mo ago
        Sadly, most other keybindings differ between org-mode, markdown-node, and auctex. I would have loved more consistency, and often end up typing the syntax instead of tripping up keybindings.
  - TimorousBestie 9mo ago
    To my memory, people had been using [link](url) and similar styling for a long time on old web forums and even BBSes. Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.
    - chrismorgan 9mo ago
      I have never heard of [text](url) being used before Markdown. “text (url)” or “text <url>”, leaving the reader to infer which words the URL applied to, sure; but among formats that provided a span for the link text, I think Markdown may have been the first to use a spelling of two adjacent delimited parts. [url text], [text|url], [url="url"]text[/url], et cetera, seen them all.
chuckadams 9mo ago
Yeah I ultimately can't hate markdown, but it really was just specified more or less as "whatever markdown.pl does", and markdown.pl was not exactly the most rigorously engineered thing. Even bbcode of all things has more predictable structure to it. The commonmark/pandoc guy now has Djot, which is supposed to be a bit more sane, but I get the feeling it's probably too late :-/
bloppe 9mo ago
Markdown succeeded because both the source code and the rendered HTML are readable. Other markups like restructured text don't look good in source form. But ya, in order to look good in source form, but still handle arbitrary content, they had to add all these little exceptions and corner cases.
velcrovan 9mo ago
HTML and CSS were also chaotic at one point and it sucked ass. Loosy goosy is fine for a hobby project but if you do anything with vanilla Markdown beyond simple links, headings and text, you quickly find yourself in a frustrating zone of incompatible hacks and syntax extensions.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9mo ago
  I maintain knowledge bases in Obsidian compatible repositories and one thing that's been great is having a hand rolled validation schema that validates against the AST output produced by remark. I call it a "markdown body grammar". So I can at least prevent people from doing edge casey things at build time when they produce documents
mikepurvis 9mo ago
And Standard Markdown / Common Markdown / CommonMark was subject to a bunch of drama when it first emerged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327 I generally like John Gruber and have been a DF reader for years, but I really never understood his perspective on this; I have trouble seeing it as much more than a "worse is better" kind of take.

TimorousBestie 9mo ago

Markdown is definitely a case of “worse is better” and it helped that it was half-canonicalizing ASCII formatting workarounds that had been in common use for decades.

chrismorgan 9mo ago
… except its link syntax. That is an abomination that had never existed and should never have existed.
- PaulHoule 9mo ago
  My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it. It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1] [1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
- dpark 9mo ago
  What’s wrong with the link syntax and what would an alternative be?
  - evnp 9mo ago
    Anything that doesn't force you to remember arbitrary ordering - square brackets first? Or parentheses? It's the textual equivalent of plugging in usb upside down. An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.
    - setopt 9mo ago
      > An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link. For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).
      - evnp 9mo ago
        This is great! Not an emacs user (as yet) but this and org-mode's /italic/ _underline_ *bold* +strike+ feel that much closer to the oft-touted "source looks kinda like formatting” ideal of markdown. Not sure why we ended up with the mediocre version as a defacto standard.
        macintux 9mo ago
        The only keyboard shortcut for org-mode and markdown-mode I consistently remember is C-c C-l for inserting links. Much easier to remember that than to remember the syntax, and the fact that both modes use the same easy-to-remember shortcut is a major win.
        setopt 9mo ago
        Sadly, most other keybindings differ between org-mode, markdown-node, and auctex. I would have loved more consistency, and often end up typing the syntax instead of tripping up keybindings.
- TimorousBestie 9mo ago
  To my memory, people had been using [link](url) and similar styling for a long time on old web forums and even BBSes. Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.
  - chrismorgan 9mo ago
    I have never heard of [text](url) being used before Markdown. “text (url)” or “text <url>”, leaving the reader to infer which words the URL applied to, sure; but among formats that provided a span for the link text, I think Markdown may have been the first to use a spelling of two adjacent delimited parts. [url text], [text|url], [url="url"]text[/url], et cetera, seen them all.

chuckadams 9mo ago

Yeah I ultimately can't hate markdown, but it really was just specified more or less as "whatever markdown.pl does", and markdown.pl was not exactly the most rigorously engineered thing. Even bbcode of all things has more predictable structure to it. The commonmark/pandoc guy now has Djot, which is supposed to be a bit more sane, but I get the feeling it's probably too late :-/

bloppe 9mo ago

Markdown succeeded because both the source code and the rendered HTML are readable. Other markups like restructured text don't look good in source form. But ya, in order to look good in source form, but still handle arbitrary content, they had to add all these little exceptions and corner cases.

velcrovan 9mo ago

HTML and CSS were also chaotic at one point and it sucked ass. Loosy goosy is fine for a hobby project but if you do anything with vanilla Markdown beyond simple links, headings and text, you quickly find yourself in a frustrating zone of incompatible hacks and syntax extensions.

SOLAR_FIELDS 9mo ago
I maintain knowledge bases in Obsidian compatible repositories and one thing that's been great is having a hand rolled validation schema that validates against the AST output produced by remark. I call it a "markdown body grammar". So I can at least prevent people from doing edge casey things at build time when they produce documents

mikepurvis 9mo ago

And Standard Markdown / Common Markdown / CommonMark was subject to a bunch of drama when it first emerged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8271327 I generally like John Gruber and have been a DF reader for years, but I really never understood his perspective on this; I have trouble seeing it as much more than a "worse is better" kind of take.