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I'd respectfully submit that if your wife is writing a novel with actual line break characters at the end of each visual line, rather than only at the end of pa
by chipotle_coyote 14y ago
I'd respectfully submit that if your wife is writing a novel with actual line break characters at the end of each visual line, rather than only at the end of paragraphs, she's kind of an edge case. "Normal people" who have been using word processors since the late 70s have had it drilled into their head that you only hit return at the end of a paragraph.
It's my suspicion that Markdown was written the way it was solely to handle the case of blockquotes having ">" characters at the start of each line, and the reason that mattered is because BBEdit and Mailsmith had commands to wrap text that way, chiefly for quoting mail messages. This happens to fit in very nicely with the way Vim and Emacs wrap paragraphs, and I know there are people who've written novels in both. But I assure you that the vast majority of fiction writers are used to word processors, and for that matter, so are the vast majority of users typing things into text boxes. And if those users wrote a little poem
That had lines
Which looked like this
And failed to rhyme
Because they weren't really poets
...the chances are they would just hit return at the end of every line, because that is the way every program they have used in their entire lives works. This is why GitHub and StackOverflow made that change: because Markdown is not like HTML to most people. It's like plain text. In plain text, when you press return it means "end of paragraph." The way Markdown does it -- and the way Hacker News does it, I just discovered! -- violates the principle of least surprise. I am not writing HTML, I am writing text, and I expect it to act like text.
(For what it's worth, I've written a collection of short stories in Markdown and created the EPUB from that using my own Python scripts to do so. I am an edge case. Anyone who is writing fiction in a text editor instead of a word processor is also an edge case. Sorry, but it's the truth.)
- maxerickson 14y agoIf you are throwing away the ability to have visually formatted source text, all the teeth gnashing over the name of the new, properly standardized and beautifully implemented format becomes completely ridiculous. Nice looking source text is pretty much the core principle of markdown. Which I suppose is the source of Gruber's apparent obstinance, if someone wants to make changes that exchange his design principles for other design principles (I don't think he cares much about naive users), why should he hand them the name of his project? (to clarify, "apparent obstinance" is me doing a poor job of keeping sarcasm out of my post, I don't have a problem with Gruber insisting that the markdown name is his)
- chipotle_coyote 14y agoI agree -- but it doesn't seem to me that "treat return characters as hard line breaks" equates to "throwing away the ability to have visually formatted source text," unless one is using an editor that is unable to deal with soft-wrapped text gracefully.
- maxerickson 14y agoWell, if the editor is wrapping things then the text itself isn't actually visually formatted. I agree that the distinction isn't very significant. But I like the idea that a shared file will look about the same without relying on there being a smart editor on the other end.
- loup-vaillant 14y agoFurthermore, what editor would correctly soft-wrap this? Really really […] really long line * Really […] really long list item 1 * Really […] really long list item 2 Most editors I know would show that: Really really[…] really long line * Really […] really long list item 1 * Really […] really long list item 2 Instead of this: Really really[…] really long line * Really […] really long list item 1 * Really […] really long list item 2
- X-Istence 14y agoStackoverflow requires you to add two spaces to the end of every one of those sentences in your poem to work as you just said it did ... Stackoverflow DID NOT make that change you suggested it did. http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks http://stackoverflow.com/editing-help#linebreaks