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You’re flat-out wrong. The biggest deployments of Markdown — StackOverflow & GitHub — do not squash line breaks. They made this decision because authors did no

by alanh 14y ago

You’re flat-out wrong. The biggest deployments of Markdown — StackOverflow & GitHub — do not squash line breaks. They made this decision because authors did not assume their line breaks would be discarded. The change is not geek arrogance. It is, in fact, a reaction to how Normal People use it.

halostatue 14y ago
If you think that users of StackOverflow and GitHub are “Normal People”, you need to adjust your personal RDF. My wife is not a geek or a programmer. She will, if forced, learn the intricacies of an idiotic programmer‘s decision to make something easier for him (and it’s almost invariably a him) in order to participate in a particular forum. This is why people put up with crap like bbcode every single day. That doesn’t mean she enjoys it. Markdown works because it makes plain text readable and formatted nicely. Markdown works because it works just as well in a plain text email as it does in an HTML-formatted email. It doesn’t work because some geek says that the people who use heavily geek-oriented sites (StackOverflow & GitHub, to use your examples) are in fact ”Normal People”. (And, just for what it’s worth, I do find the fact that I have to join all my hard-wrapped lines back together in SO & GH comments to be immensely annoying. At least their markdown parser for .markdown files doesn’t do this.) So, no I am not flat-out wrong. I hear geek whining that parsing is made harder because of a design feature that is present because most people don't think about or want to think about “correct” line-endings. Before you decide that I’m full of hot air, understand that I am working with my wife’s novel that’s written in Markdown so that I can parse it (possibly using an existing well-written-and-maintained parser like peg-markdown or peg-multimarkdown as an intermediate mechanism) and then transform it into the LaTeX formatting required for making her PDF output and the HTML formatting required for making her EPUB (and thus MOBI) output. I am well aware of how ugly some of it is…but it makes it easier for her to write her novel without falling back to proprietary formats like .docx. I’m willing to deal with some pain as an implementor in order to minimize what she has to deal with. As such, I don’t really have a lot of patience for this type of geek whinging.
- stickfigure 14y ago
  Implied assumptions: * Normal People have a consistent expectation regarding the behavior of line breaks. * Normal People are comfortable with markdown in the first place. Neither you nor your wife are Normal People.
- saurik 14y ago
  Why do you feel like normal people, who have been trained for decades--not just on computers but on typewriters as well--that hitting enter means "go to the next line", would have an easier time if that assumption was violated? You even see the formatting in front of you: you are now on the next line, and yet when rendered this information is somehow ignored and the text is pasted together. E-mail clients, which have been doing crazy things to our text for years, don't even do this: the closest they come is format=flowed, and that's a special set of rules designed to be generated by clients, not typed by mere mortals.
  - halostatue 14y ago
    I feel this way because of the reality that many people will centre text in a document by inserting spaces in front of the text they want centered, rather than using their word processor's centre command. It drives me absolutely bonkers to see that, but it's reality. I feel this way because of the reality that many people will hit enter two dozen times to go to a new page, or to position a bit of text. In the time that I've been working with computers, what I've come to realize is that most people simply don't have a grasp of the abstractions of the computer—they remember particular incantations that worked for them last time and keep doing them again and again. My wife is an intelligent person; probably smarter than I am. She speaks three languages and has taught for the last twenty-two years. Watching her use the computer drives me absolutely bonkers because she doesn't use any of the things that I know make the computer easier to use. Neither does her sister. Why? Because neither of them have time to specialize in the use of the computer. They use it a lot, and I've been able to introduce a few things—but only for things that simplify their lives because they integrate into how they already work. If two of the most intelligent people I know don't have a lot of these expectations…why do people think that most people would expect things to work the way that Jeff has proposed? In a sibling comment (I only want to reply once), stickfigure says: “Normal People have a consistent expectation regarding the behavior of line breaks.” Actually, I don't think that Normal People have any understanding of line breaks at all. They understand letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and to a degree pages. They know they want something to show up on the page, but they have no understanding of how the computer does its magic to make that happen. stickfigure: “Normal People are comfortable with markdown in the first place. Neither you nor your wife are Normal People.” For the second sentence, I agree and disagree. I'm certainly a geek with a more-than-passing interest in layout, formatting, fonts, etc.… This stuff interests me in a way that most people and most geeks certainly would never be interested in it. My wife is also not normal people on some level—she’s married to a geek who can take care of things like this for her. At the same time, she is 100% a computer user and has no interest in learning to program or learning to fight with programs that actively get in her way. She also doesn't know Markdown as such. She knows a tiny subset that I have introduced to her that provides her with exactly enough to write her novel and for me to format it the way she wants it. (That's the paragraph rules, italics, and headings.) I've shown her a few other things for when she blogs—but even when she's using the Squarespace WYSIWYG editor, I often have to go in and edit the links to make them right. There's a lot more that I could show her, but she neither has the time nor the interest to learn it.
bdr 14y ago
You seem to be in violent agreement.
JeremyBanks 14y ago
You're mistaken: Stack Overflow does collapse line breaks in posts. Example: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/152661/134300 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/152661/134300 It is a pretty common mistake for new users to make, though most of the time an editor will fix it pretty quickly and the user will learn.
- alanh 14y ago
  Hmm, case-in-point, then. Thanks for pointing that out.
X-Istence 14y ago
StackOverflow DOES: http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks Notice the requirement for two spaces at the end, ONLY Github doesn't do that.

by alanh 14y ago

halostatue 14y ago

If you think that users of StackOverflow and GitHub are “Normal People”, you need to adjust your personal RDF. My wife is not a geek or a programmer. She will, if forced, learn the intricacies of an idiotic programmer‘s decision to make something easier for him (and it’s almost invariably a him) in order to participate in a particular forum. This is why people put up with crap like bbcode every single day. That doesn’t mean she enjoys it. Markdown works because it makes plain text readable and formatted nicely. Markdown works because it works just as well in a plain text email as it does in an HTML-formatted email. It doesn’t work because some geek says that the people who use heavily geek-oriented sites (StackOverflow & GitHub, to use your examples) are in fact ”Normal People”. (And, just for what it’s worth, I do find the fact that I have to join all my hard-wrapped lines back together in SO & GH comments to be immensely annoying. At least their markdown parser for .markdown files doesn’t do this.) So, no I am not flat-out wrong. I hear geek whining that parsing is made harder because of a design feature that is present because most people don't think about or want to think about “correct” line-endings. Before you decide that I’m full of hot air, understand that I am working with my wife’s novel that’s written in Markdown so that I can parse it (possibly using an existing well-written-and-maintained parser like peg-markdown or peg-multimarkdown as an intermediate mechanism) and then transform it into the LaTeX formatting required for making her PDF output and the HTML formatting required for making her EPUB (and thus MOBI) output. I am well aware of how ugly some of it is…but it makes it easier for her to write her novel without falling back to proprietary formats like .docx. I’m willing to deal with some pain as an implementor in order to minimize what she has to deal with. As such, I don’t really have a lot of patience for this type of geek whinging.

stickfigure 14y ago
Implied assumptions: * Normal People have a consistent expectation regarding the behavior of line breaks. * Normal People are comfortable with markdown in the first place. Neither you nor your wife are Normal People.
saurik 14y ago
Why do you feel like normal people, who have been trained for decades--not just on computers but on typewriters as well--that hitting enter means "go to the next line", would have an easier time if that assumption was violated? You even see the formatting in front of you: you are now on the next line, and yet when rendered this information is somehow ignored and the text is pasted together. E-mail clients, which have been doing crazy things to our text for years, don't even do this: the closest they come is format=flowed, and that's a special set of rules designed to be generated by clients, not typed by mere mortals.
- halostatue 14y ago
  I feel this way because of the reality that many people will centre text in a document by inserting spaces in front of the text they want centered, rather than using their word processor's centre command. It drives me absolutely bonkers to see that, but it's reality. I feel this way because of the reality that many people will hit enter two dozen times to go to a new page, or to position a bit of text. In the time that I've been working with computers, what I've come to realize is that most people simply don't have a grasp of the abstractions of the computer—they remember particular incantations that worked for them last time and keep doing them again and again. My wife is an intelligent person; probably smarter than I am. She speaks three languages and has taught for the last twenty-two years. Watching her use the computer drives me absolutely bonkers because she doesn't use any of the things that I know make the computer easier to use. Neither does her sister. Why? Because neither of them have time to specialize in the use of the computer. They use it a lot, and I've been able to introduce a few things—but only for things that simplify their lives because they integrate into how they already work. If two of the most intelligent people I know don't have a lot of these expectations…why do people think that most people would expect things to work the way that Jeff has proposed? In a sibling comment (I only want to reply once), stickfigure says: “Normal People have a consistent expectation regarding the behavior of line breaks.” Actually, I don't think that Normal People have any understanding of line breaks at all. They understand letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and to a degree pages. They know they want something to show up on the page, but they have no understanding of how the computer does its magic to make that happen. stickfigure: “Normal People are comfortable with markdown in the first place. Neither you nor your wife are Normal People.” For the second sentence, I agree and disagree. I'm certainly a geek with a more-than-passing interest in layout, formatting, fonts, etc.… This stuff interests me in a way that most people and most geeks certainly would never be interested in it. My wife is also not normal people on some level—she’s married to a geek who can take care of things like this for her. At the same time, she is 100% a computer user and has no interest in learning to program or learning to fight with programs that actively get in her way. She also doesn't know Markdown as such. She knows a tiny subset that I have introduced to her that provides her with exactly enough to write her novel and for me to format it the way she wants it. (That's the paragraph rules, italics, and headings.) I've shown her a few other things for when she blogs—but even when she's using the Squarespace WYSIWYG editor, I often have to go in and edit the links to make them right. There's a lot more that I could show her, but she neither has the time nor the interest to learn it.

bdr 14y ago

You seem to be in violent agreement.

JeremyBanks 14y ago

You're mistaken: Stack Overflow does collapse line breaks in posts. Example: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/152661/134300 http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/152661/134300 It is a pretty common mistake for new users to make, though most of the time an editor will fix it pretty quickly and the user will learn.

alanh 14y ago
Hmm, case-in-point, then. Thanks for pointing that out.

X-Istence 14y ago

StackOverflow DOES: http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks Notice the requirement for two spaces at the end, ONLY Github doesn't do that.