4 ms·

What's the reasoning behind your loathing?

ScottBurson 14y ago
I can't speculate on antidaily's reasoning, but I can tell you why I don't like this way of doing markup. (I thought I was the last one.) First is the lack of standardization. Asterisks traditionally meant boldface, I thought, but in some of these systems they mean italics. Some use underscores for italics, while others use slashes. And those are just the common conventions; the less frequently used ones tend to be even less standardized. Second is the fact that the more conventions these languages implement, the more likely I am to emit one unintentionally, and then have to figure out how to escape the input so it's treated literally, if the language even supports that. (Note for instance the long-standing Lisp convention of putting asterisks around special variable names.) Thirdly, the syntax rules of these languages are often ill-specified and incorrectly implemented, making it difficult to tell at times how to get the effect I want. EDITED to add: if you're wondering what I would suggest as an alternative to Markdown-style markup, this is an example of the kind of thing I prefer: http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-language http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-languag... The syntax is uniform, but much easier to type than bare HTML.
dpark 14y ago
Off the top of my head: * Links with parentheses often break * Intra-word underscores have to be escaped * Links are backwards (text,link instead of link,text like HTML anchors) * Link syntax is pretty arbitrary (why braces and brackets?) * Single line breaks are swallowed unless you append two spaces to the line. (How is this a "natural" formatting?) * Footnotes with asterisks turn into bullet lists Most or all of these are resolved by various implementations, but that's just another reason to hate Markdown: the inconsistencies between implementations.

I can't speculate on antidaily's reasoning, but I can tell you why I don't like this way of doing markup. (I thought I was the last one.) First is the lack of standardization. Asterisks traditionally meant boldface, I thought, but in some of these systems they mean italics. Some use underscores for italics, while others use slashes. And those are just the common conventions; the less frequently used ones tend to be even less standardized. Second is the fact that the more conventions these languages implement, the more likely I am to emit one unintentionally, and then have to figure out how to escape the input so it's treated literally, if the language even supports that. (Note for instance the long-standing Lisp convention of putting asterisks around special variable names.) Thirdly, the syntax rules of these languages are often ill-specified and incorrectly implemented, making it difficult to tell at times how to get the effect I want. EDITED to add: if you're wondering what I would suggest as an alternative to Markdown-style markup, this is an example of the kind of thing I prefer: http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-language http://nbsp.io/development/doccy-a-mid-weight-markup-languag... The syntax is uniform, but much easier to type than bare HTML.

dpark 14y ago

Off the top of my head: * Links with parentheses often break * Intra-word underscores have to be escaped * Links are backwards (text,link instead of link,text like HTML anchors) * Link syntax is pretty arbitrary (why braces and brackets?) * Single line breaks are swallowed unless you append two spaces to the line. (How is this a "natural" formatting?) * Footnotes with asterisks turn into bullet lists Most or all of these are resolved by various implementations, but that's just another reason to hate Markdown: the inconsistencies between implementations.