4 ms·

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

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.

saurik 14y ago
Both of your examples--using spaces to center text and using a dozen newlines to position text--are based on the reasonable assumption of "what I see in my text is what I got when I formatted it": removing carriage returns entirely and pasting lines together to form larger lines violates that assumption. If the user expects that they can go to the second page by adding a dozen newlines, how could they possibly understand that newlines now don't mean anything at all? I will repeat: for decades, the enter key has meant a very specific behavior, and Markdown is the only setup I can come up with that either myself or my mother (or my grandmother) would have ever come across where the enter key doesn't cause at least a single line break.
- halostatue 14y ago
  Most people think that a block of text that is set together is a paragraph, especially as block paragraph format has become the norm for casual and business writing; indented paragraphs are the exception used when you have a layout process and not just depending on your word processor to get it right for you. Email and HTML have not helped this; it is a common expectation that a blank line between two blocks of text represents the paragraph break—at least based on the emails that I've seen over the last two decades. A fundamental philosophy of Markdown is that a Markdown document looks reasonable when sent via email as text or when sent as a formatted web page. That it's flexible enough to be usable for more than just email and HTML is a bonus.
  - saurik 14y ago
    It is also a common expectation that if you put a newline in an e-mail message, even without a blank line intervening, that the person who receives the message will not get the two lines pasted together to form a single line. The problem with the newline behavior of markdown--and to a very real extent this is the only such feature of markdown that has this bug--is that the text you are looking at looks nothing like the text that ends up being rendered.

saurik 14y ago

Both of your examples--using spaces to center text and using a dozen newlines to position text--are based on the reasonable assumption of "what I see in my text is what I got when I formatted it": removing carriage returns entirely and pasting lines together to form larger lines violates that assumption. If the user expects that they can go to the second page by adding a dozen newlines, how could they possibly understand that newlines now don't mean anything at all? I will repeat: for decades, the enter key has meant a very specific behavior, and Markdown is the only setup I can come up with that either myself or my mother (or my grandmother) would have ever come across where the enter key doesn't cause at least a single line break.

halostatue 14y ago
Most people think that a block of text that is set together is a paragraph, especially as block paragraph format has become the norm for casual and business writing; indented paragraphs are the exception used when you have a layout process and not just depending on your word processor to get it right for you. Email and HTML have not helped this; it is a common expectation that a blank line between two blocks of text represents the paragraph break—at least based on the emails that I've seen over the last two decades. A fundamental philosophy of Markdown is that a Markdown document looks reasonable when sent via email as text or when sent as a formatted web page. That it's flexible enough to be usable for more than just email and HTML is a bonus.
- saurik 14y ago
  It is also a common expectation that if you put a newline in an e-mail message, even without a blank line intervening, that the person who receives the message will not get the two lines pasted together to form a single line. The problem with the newline behavior of markdown--and to a very real extent this is the only such feature of markdown that has this bug--is that the text you are looking at looks nothing like the text that ends up being rendered.