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I agree with all of this. I'd also like to note that some parts of Markdown from the user perspective are non-intuitive and clumsy. Such as links and images (
by buro9 14y ago
I agree with all of this.
I'd also like to note that some parts of Markdown from the user perspective are non-intuitive and clumsy.
Such as links and images (inline).
Markdown works so well because it is intuitive and appeals to those who once saw old word processors. They don't have to worry about syntax, and can just enter their text into a textarea (free from JavaScript WYSIWYG interference and the inherent troubles of running that on old and new mobile phones, their playstation, web browsers, etc)... and it just works.
Yet some parts of markdown are simply not intuitive. Links and images are two places where I see in usability testing that the end user will constantly refer to help documentation to figure out how to do it.
Beyond getting the code consistent, maintainable, and testable I'd love to see the language itself solve some of the papercuts that trouble the lay end user.
Realising that what I was planning to do for my project (discussion forums, tumblr for forums) was to create an alternative to markdown that would resolve some of these user issues as well as parser issues, I had already decided that I would not call it markdown and that I would educate my users in something new that hopefully solves their and my needs and would remain very stable due to a well-thought out and documented design in the first place. If what you're proposing is in this vein then consider my hat thrown in, what help I can give I will... take me to your git repository.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoWhat is your problem with the link syntax? I think it's one of the best bits.
- jacobr 14y agoYou have to remember 1) which comes first, url or link text? 2) is it () or []?
- alexchamberlain 14y agoI'm just wondering whether a better solution to this is a polite warning in the UI... Did you mean []() instead of ()[]?
- ars 14y agoI like the wikipedia syntax better for this [url text]. It's much easier to remember.
- alexchamberlain 14y agoThe problem is that this is a discussion about standardising the Markdown syntax, not changing it.
- ars 14y agoWikipedia also uses markdown. So since there is no standard format for URLs, let's pick a good one. Also, it could support both of these syntaxes at once - they don't conflict.
- buro9 14y agoThe fact that Meteor wish to call this Rockdown suggests to me it is to change it. By creating a specification and tests, they will be modifying Markdown even if just subtly enough to remove bugs and ambiguity. Doing even that is to create something that isn't Markdown, existing Markdown parsers may do something different with the same text... so clearly this isn't Markdown. It may share 90% (or more, or less) similarity with Markdown, but some areas would certainly need tweaking and changing to make the goal (specification, testability, consistent implementations) possible. To my understanding this means that Rockdown is Markdown inspired/derived. And as such, that there is a hope that a good specification and the ability to be implemented in a testable and consistent way... will, by mass use (on the sites mentioned), eventually result in Rockdown superseding Markdown. In my universe, I'm simply looking to get rid of bbcode as the markup syntax of choice. And if you were at the support end of trying to tell people how to insert images on forums then you'd understand that the Markdown syntax is a real difficulty for a lot of people. The path that I prefer is to use Markdown, but the areas that cause the greatest difficulty in usability testing, to modify those to make things more implicit and frictionless. Worrying about []() (or vice versa) is an obstacle to the user that shouldn't exist. But if everything else is good from a user perspective then I definitely want to keep that stuff.
- 178 14y agoI struggled with that until I looked at it from a parser perspective: links start with [] because () are much more commons in normal language.
- spion 14y agoThere is actually an even easier method. In normal text, we usually link to things by first citing them then providing the link. An example would be Google (http://www.google.com http://www.google.com). Its natural that we surround the link in () in normal text. Now the bit we add to help the parser is to tell it where the thing we're linking to begins and where it ends. [ and ] are not usually found in normal text and are therefore used for this purpose. Thus the modified example would be [Google](http://www.google.com http://www.google.com).
- daigoba66 14y agoBeautiful explanation. And one that I can remember while writing in markdown.
- SiVal 14y agoI would much rather see a more mnemonic approach for links, where you would write either _click here_ [http://wherever.com http://wherever.com] or _click here_ (http://wherever.com http://wherever.com). The underscores look like an underline, which is the traditional appearance of link text in HTML. It's easy to remember. Whether the URL is in square brackets or parentheses (maybe either one would be acceptable as long as they are a matched pair) doesn't matter, but underlining the anchor text is the way to go, IMO.
- uvtc 14y agoI look at it like this: [this] looks a bit like a button you might press (or a link you might click). It looks like what it does. (this) looks like something you'd whisper off to the side --- to add to the conversation. For example, "That picture is nice (but it needs more trees).". So links go like: [this is the thing you click](and btw, this is where it leads).
- fudged71 14y agoHaving wasted a lot of my life reading miles of reddit comments, there are some people who don't understand the link syntax, or switch the brackets ()[]. It happens. But not that often, when the alternate way of posting a link is to just paste it in plain text with no title associated with it.
- ams6110 14y agoThis is sort of my problem with the whole genre of "light" markup formats.... ultimately they are still a bunch of arbitary conventions to remember, and at that point you might as well just learn/write HTML. YMMV.
- zmj 14y agoThat's not the problem being solved by Markdown. You don't want to be serving HTML written by users.
- georgemcbay 14y agoWhy not? You have to protect against malicious HTML injection whether or not the user is using markdown, plain text or html, so why not let them use a carefully restricted subset of html?
- nsmartt 14y agoWhile this is not wrong, markdown involves much less typing than HTML. Also, should one need to use HTML, markdown does allow one to switch between HTML and markdown.
- halostatue 14y agoStrictly speaking, that isn't the problem being solved by Markdown, either. Remember that Daring Fireball does not have comments, so this isn't a concern. Markdown was something originally created to solve an authorial problem, not something for forum creators to use for comments. It's flexible enough to do that, but it isn't the purpose of Markdown.
- wwweston 14y agoThey're arguably less arbitrary than HTML; most of them are based in things that people have done/tend to do with plain text when they're trying to create a formatted document. That yields two benefits: the source document is inherently formatted -- transparently so, since even people who don't know what Markdown or the like is will be able to read it -- and creates something of a visual mnemonic for the formatting convention. Not saying any one implementation is perfect, just that they have these nice properties.