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It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate
by nostrademons 7mo ago
It's also worth remembering that markdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media. A > to indicate a quote was widespread Usenet convention. Asterisks or underscores to indicate emphasis was also a common convention; both are legal because both were common. Double asterisk or double underscores to indicate really, really emphasizing something was also a common convention. So were asterisks to display a bulleted list, blank lines to separate paragraphs, and indenting 4+ spaces to write code.
It's a good example of "pave the path" design philosophy, where you do what users are already doing rather than trying to impose some platonic ideal of what the world should be like. And it works quite well at that.
- reaperducer 7mo agomarkdown tried very hard to encode conventions that were already used in Usenet, email, and other text media For those of you who weren't there: *bold* _underline_ ~strikethrough~ /italics/ > Quotation - list - list - list I've been using these for almost half a century. They're much easier and more intuitive than Markdown. I see no compelling reason to change.
- nostrademons 7mo agoYour quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.) Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an <em> (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 7mo agoWhat ambiguities are there with bold?
- nickloewen 7mo agoSuppose you want to use asterisks to mark footnotes.* As soon as you add a second footnote,** you're in trouble because your asterisks disappear and everything between them turns bold. * I had to escape all of these asterisks. ** I see this happen fairly often to people's comments here.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 7mo agoDisappearing asterisks is just terrible UX. It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal. The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.
- registeredcorn 7mo agoWhat ought, amn't
- eviks 7mo ago> It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal. This is just terrible UI, why do you need garbage marks when you already have bold? And you can edit "as normal" if you like, but that only requires displaying asterisks during that tiny % of time you edit the word, not all the time when you read it or edit something else.
- localuser13 7mo agoThis is just a personal preference. I strongly prefer to see the markup as I write it. I can't stand disappearing characters.
- eviks 7mo agoDo you enable visibility of tab and space?
- dingaling 7mo agoBut Usenet style didn't have a trendy name, an 'inventor' or Github stars. So it didn't exist.
- geerlingguy 7mo agoGitHub stars weren't a thing when Markdown was roughly codified. Was GitHub even around then?
- Jtsummers 7mo agoGit wasn't even around.
- beautron 7mo agoOne problem with the /italics/ form is that it's not convenient when writing about filesystem paths (though I do like its visual indication of slanting).
- _bernd 7mo agoA path should be written `/root`...
- bnjms 7mo agoI agree that file paths should be in `backticks`. Or italics can be //double slash// to avoid ambiguities with file paths. That still leaves the windows style //some/file/path as ambiguous But I’ll never accept single * as natural for italics.
- AceyMan 7mo agoTry finding the backtick on a mobile phone keyboard in less than a minute, tho. So very annoying. (SwiftKey I'm look at you, bud.)
- mcv 7mo agoYeah, *asterisks* for italic has always felt wrong to me. I can understand underscores if slashes cause confusion with file paths. *bold* and _italic_ would have been better.
- Mordisquitos 7mo agoI agree that using *asterisks* just feels wrong for italics, and are much better suited for bold. However, surely the _underscore_ is just perfect to visually indicate underlining? As for /slashes/, which would visually be perfect for italics, the only reason they conflict between italics and filepaths is the fact that in both cases they are expected to be used at the beginning and end of a word. Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics.
- politician 7mo ago_underscore_ for italics conflicts with most identifiers in most languages. Markdown was created in an era before the web had easily used components for structural syntax highlighting (tree-sitter) and where reliance on regex-based approaches was more common.
- sudahtigabulan 7mo ago> Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked as a non-conflicting indicator of italics. Using different delimiter for opening and closing is a good idea on its own, too. I think it makes parsing simpler and unambiguous wrt nesting. I've imagined something like this: `(monospace) _(underline) /(italics) ~(overstrike) Probably looks a bit more distracting, though.
- IIsi50MHz 7mo ago> Maybe using an unnatural placement of )parentheses( could have worked O, c'mon! That is clearly a giant heading in a display font, squeezed in the middle and wider at the top and bottom. (-;
- johannesrexx 7mo ago
- alisonatwork 7mo agoThanks for posting this. I feel like for years we've been getting gaslit by the Markdown guys who inexplicably decided that stars should make text go italic instead of bold. I get it wrong every single time and then have to go back and look up a cheat sheet. It really isn't intuitive at all, and it also doesn't codify how we used to write before rich text entry boxes where available everywhere. Markdown reminds me more of all the custom wiki and forum markups that proliferated in the 2000s than any text-based conventions in use prior.
- tmalsburg2 7mo agoOrg-mode FTW
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- TRiG_Ireland 7mo agoI have historically used asterisks for emphasis and slashes for the use/mention distinction.
- oftenwrong 7mo agoI have long used underscores for _emphasis_, but I never made the connection that it was meant to resemble an underline until now.
- singpolyma3 7mo agoStepped right on the rake though because it uses sigils which were common, but requires they be used in uncommon ways (by doubling etc) which it why most chat UIs don't actually use markdown
- packetlost 7mo agoSomehow basically only Discord gets it almost perfectly right though.
- devmor 7mo agoWhich is very recent. Discord only added full markdown support a couple years ago.
- packetlost 7mo agoEven when they only had a subset, that subset was correct
- je42 7mo agoWriting mark down linter, i am i nterested in - if you think that you requirements for markdown formatting could be encoded in (relatively) simple rules?
- guerrilla 7mo agoJust search "Markdown grammar"
- bityard 7mo agoCheck out commonmark
- spartanatreyu 7mo agoCommommark is the best, then looking at the most commonly implemented extensions: - Superscript with hat symbol (^) - Hidden content (also known as spoiler tags, content warnings, click-to-reveal, etc...) with two pipe symbols (||) at start and end of hidden content. Interact with the content to show the content inside. - Table syntax to show tabular data and align content with pipe, hyphen, colon symbols --- After that, I'd look at the extensions that are only useful for the use-case you're targeting: - Subscripting with tilde symbol (~) - IDs, Classes and Attributes - Task lists - Sections / Containers - Language labels for code blocks - Math Support (mathml, latex, katex, etc...) - Table of Contents / Footnotes - Definition lists - etc...