7 ms·

Markdown is the Future of Writing

40 points by vinhnx 13y ago

icedog 13y ago
As everyone has noted, good writing shouldn't be bogged down with syntax, yet the author proposes people ditch editors/bars and just write it directly? If you want that, just switch to source view and write. Otherwise, I'm quite content with working in a lightweight editor with keyboard shortcuts. Frankly, I prefer to format my text with HTML anyhow. Markdown is easier on the eyes, but it has limited function and is just another level of separation between what I write and what you see.
libovness 13y ago
The premise here that "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks" should be questioned. Who says that the content of the writing is necessarily so much more important than how it looks? There's a reason that books are meant to look nice - we enjoy the look and feel of them. Likewise, I enjoy reading things on certain blogs - e.g., The Verge, Medium, Grantland - because they look really great and it's a great reading experience. I'm almost tempted to think that it's the opposite - superpowerful WYSIWYG is the future of writing. End users will get to create amazing multimedia experiences. For better or worse, writing will be freed from being just about words.
- zenojevski 13y ago
  One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateurish, or downright tiring to read: differences in spacing, font, color, all these make for an awful end result which is also annoying to maintain[1]. All in all this is akin to provisioning instead of scripting: you declare _what you want_ (a pull-out quote) instead of _how to do it_, letting the compiler take care of the rest. The downside of markdown is that it is a two phase compose/preview system, which has been resolved with dual panes up to now. But it is not a showstopper, especially considering that professional copywriters already compose stories separate from presentation[2]. [1]: Yes, I know that Word has _styles_. Which are kind of similar in intent to markdown's #, >, *, even though they are not always semantically significant, and they also include presentation. [2]: InDesign's story editor: http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-editor.png http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-...
eksith 13y ago
The key takeaway : "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks"... which is arguably a bit difficult when you're manipulating raw HTML and a bit... detached on WISIWYG. Markdown allows sophisticated ideas to fall into text with a very simple syntax. I don't know of any other system that allows this except just plain text. Edit: Hmm... looks like agreeing with the article isn't popular for some reason.
- ghayes 13y ago
  The issue with Markdown is the syntax is pretty horrible. To create a link, it's [ title ] ( url ), which is incredibly unintuitive. I'm still never sure if italics are or * *. Heck, if I want a single newline, that's not possible. I am all for using a markup syntax; I just wish we had a better option than Markdown specifically. Additionally, Medium is specifically, heavily concerned with "how it looks" as that is one of the main selling points of the blog software.
  - computeloops 13y ago
    reStructuredText is another option. It is quite powerful, but the syntax is little complex compared to Markdown. http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
  - backprojection 13y ago
    Silly question: shouldn't be piss-simple to write with whatever syntax you like and parse it to markdown, with tools like Python?
  - dchest 13y ago
    A single newline is possible, and it's the most horrible thing in Markdown: When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p
    - 13y ago
peterarmstrong 13y ago
At Leanpub we bet the whole startup on Markdown, so we certainly agree! We love Markdown since it means that writers focus on writing, not on formatting...
donniezazen 13y ago
It baffles me that WordPress doesn't have Markdown by default.
- eksith 13y ago
  I think WP has a lot of historical reasons for sticking with an HTML based WYSIWYG. Also, they've spent a lot of time and effort customizing TinyMCE. If you like WordPress but want to keep things simple, you may like Habari : http://habariproject.org http://habariproject.org
jmduke 13y ago
The easiest counterargument possible: Good writing doesn't need syntax. Sinclair and Joyce and Fitzgerald and Twain didn't need italics or heading tags: just like structuring a post as a list is a sign of structural weakness, designating something with a header tag is admitting defeat, is admitting "Hey, look at this, this means something is happening over here." (I love Markdown, and use it daily.)
- adregan 13y ago
  Markdown is great for writing on the web, but it's not the future of writing. I love markdown, but all word processing is still so restrictive compared to earlier forms of composition, and HTML is still a horrible medium for poetry: Hannah Weiner used to manipulate the page in her typewriter for great effects in the 70s and 80s (http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/weiner_indians.pdf http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/weiner_indians.pdf). Charles Olson called the page an open field in 1950 (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/237880 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/23788...). Our linear text flow doesn't allow for the kind of poetry that Apollinaire was making in the early 20th century (http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/Apollinaire_Calligrams.pdf http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/Apollinaire_Calligrams.p...). Heck, for that matter HTML can't even maintain line breaks or distinguish stanzas (should they be p tags?).
- lifeformed 13y ago
  Two different mediums. Fictional literature is about communicating with words in a book. Web articles are about communicating with words on the internet, which is much more visual, interactive, and malleable. If you can improve communication with proper formatting, go for it, if it fits the medium.
toolslive 13y ago
Suppose my writing includes tables, what do I do then?
- kaeluka 13y ago
  org-mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJVLJd_gz0&feature=player_detailpage#t=182 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJVLJd_gz0&feature=player_d...
  - 616c 13y ago
    It is surprising that no one here mentioned org-mode yet. I am picking it up now and wonder why no one mentioned, as the whole plugin, as I have been told and what interested, is like the CLI version of Trello.
- wingerlang 13y ago
  "Mou" (an osx app) have got support for tables within its markdown.
- awsm 13y ago
  Markdown has tables: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Here-Cheatsheet#wiki-tables https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Here-C...
  - toolslive 13y ago
    first sentence there: "Tables aren't part of the core Markdown spec, ...." Anyway somehow, padding the columns with spaces to align the pipes isn't workable. If I change the width on 1 line, the whole table has to be modified. Face it: in the current millennium, for serious writing, there's still nothing better than Latex. (which is a bit sad)
  - Marazan 13y ago
    That's Markdown-Here, not Markdown.
- chown 13y ago
quasque 13y ago
The idea the author is illustrating reminds me of this even simpler, no-distractions, plain text editor http://writer.bighugelabs.com/ http://writer.bighugelabs.com/ It works really well for me when just trying to get thoughts out into words. Then it's just a case of pasting it into a 'proper' editor later to work on the finer editing, formatting, and suchlike.
useflyer 13y ago
Markdown is like Vim -- sure, it might speed up your output, if that's your sole focus. And its not meant to be adopted en masse. I'm a designer and relatively intelligent person by trade, and I have a difficult time with markdown. It requires me to have a guide open, to be able to write. No "normal folks" I know can decipher markdown. The trick is to make styling easy -- not to make styling an afterthought. The writer, writing on Medium, should recognize this.
- philjackson 13y ago
  > relatively intelligent person by trade Interesting trade. Your place doesn't need someone of mediocre intelligence do they?
andmarios 13y ago
“Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks.” Usually this is the [type of] phrase we use to describe LaTeX.
- ternaryoperator 13y ago
  Really? That's not my experience with LaTeX at all: I (and others like me) am constantly looking up commands, special characters, parameters to commands, remembering to close braces, etc. And when things don't work as I or they expect, finding the problem is a nightmare. LaTeX is great for typesetting -- that is, when you want to focus on how it looks.
  - andmarios 13y ago
    The problems you describe are a sign that you still haven't learned LaTeX. I never claimed there isn't a steep learning curve. But these problems haven't to do with the appearance of your document. Also you seem to miss the point of LaTeX. Of course you care how your documents look, this is one of the main reasons to use it. But you are smart enough to know that there are two parts in creating a document. The first is the content, this is your part, this is where your expertise lies. So you write and give some general instructions about the structure of your writings. The second part is the typesetting and this is LaTeX's work. A common pitfall is trying to use LaTeX as MS Word.
chmike 13y ago
Which markdown is he talking about ? There are no standard and each editor has it's own rules. Bullet lists? How do you make sub bullet lists ? Use tabs ? No tab on iPad. Tables ? There is a Markdown dialect for that. Markdown has limitations and needs to be standardized.
- GuiA 13y ago
  There is a reference syntax respected by all scrupulous editors [1]. It's a decentralized standard, sure, but it's compact and logical enough that it's unequivocally respected across the web. [1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
  - Marazan 13y ago
    Gruber's Markdown syntax has a bunch of ambiguities in it.
    - chmike 13y ago
      Yes. Thank you to point it out. That is what I meant by standardization. An effort to identify and sort out these ambiguities or missing features like how to escape * *, etc. I'm a fan user of Markdown, but I'm also frequently frustrated because it could be made so much more powerful and efficient while preserving the same initial spirit.
      - Marazan 13y ago
        Not only that but the "reference" implementation on the website has bugs in it that Gruber has fixed but for some reason he hasn't updated the file. If you know what to search for in the Markdown mailing list you can find his latest version but it is insane that it's not on the page.
- jeena 13y ago
  There was a attempt to do that www.w3.org/community/markdown/ But Gruber was childish about it: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800
brianberns 13y ago
Markdown seems to be part of the retro/hipster trend, along with flat UIs, 8-bit video game music, fixie bikes, and Pabst beer. As someone who actually lived through the 1980s, it's amusing to watch you young cats reinvent my youth. I'm not saying Markdown is a bad idea, but I'm perfectly happy using the rich UI provided by a word processor when I write. Next thing you know, someone will claim that 80 characters max per line was a great idea, and there will be a little iPhone app that rings a bell when you get to column 75 so you can hit the carriage return in time. Non-skeuomorphically, of course.
- Roboprog 13y ago
  But, I like 80 column lines. Er, I guess that doesn't make sense with proportional fonts :-) Still, fill the page width, but use snaked columns if the page is wide or the font is small. I guess that's kind of like an 80 column rule.
- DH61AG 13y ago
  It's one of those retro things that just won't die.
Roboprog 13y ago
Yet, somehow all the WYSIWIG editors beat out nroff and WordPerfect. Personally, the trick to writing with a word processor is to not waste too much time on the formatting, and just write. Also, learn to use the "sytles", just like you use CSS in an HTML file. I first learned to do significant writing in a WYSIWIG editor using Samna/Lotus Ami (accent on the i). Then Word, then Open/Libre Office. All of these have style lists. Use them! Don't waste time clicking on all the fonts, sizes, spacing, etc block after block. The "Styles" menu seems to be one of the best kept secrets in Word and similar word processors.
justinator 13y ago
Before markdown (for me), there was Perl's POD. [0] Simple to pick up, does what it says on the tin, easy to hack in, "Do What I Want", for things missing. The tools for it are a little all over the place, but, "Turn this into HTML" (pod2html) works, and works well for documentation. Can you write whole books with it? People do - I believe many of the Perl books put out by O'Reilly are written in a POD dialect. [0]http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html
computeloops 13y ago
The upcoming Ghost[1] blogging platform/tool has side by side post editor that supports Markdown on left and visual formatting on right. This should make it easier to learn Markdown syntax. Also, I believe, Markdown is the best option for generating formatted content on touch based devices. [1]http://tryghost.org/features.html http://tryghost.org/features.html
- est 13y ago
  two-column layout is so last decade. Why hasn't anyone invented inline markdown editor yet? Your current cursor line should be markdown source in plain text, other lines rendered HTML.
  - guynamedloren 13y ago
    Prose.io has kind of a hybrid markdown editor (I think it's WYSIWYM?). It has markdown syntax highlighting that happens to look similar to the final output, though the markdown tags are still displayed. They also have a toolbar, which is used like a regular WYSIWYG toolbar, but generates mardown tags. It's pretty neat.
  - voyou 13y ago
    Why not render the current line in HTML too?
chappi42 13y ago
Markdown is a mess. Gruber refuses to take care and now there are a ton of slightly different dialects because the original draft is clearly lacking in some respects. Just last week wanted to use GFM, they introduced a new newline style. Or maybe not? In gollum it doesn't seem to be working and then there are breaking lines with two spaces. Or not? It's a desaster. Some group should take over the markdown format definition.
- draegtun 13y ago
  It's a shame Carl Sassenrath's MakeDoc didn't catch on (outside of the Rebol world at least). NB. MakeDoc was already 4 years old when Markdown was born. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeDoc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeDoc
  - eksith 13y ago
    That's interesting. Considering the similarity, I wonder if Markdown was influenced in part or whole by MakeDoc.
- sausman 13y ago
  Go for it. You could call it Topdown.
  - bebna 13y ago
    Or Markup. Oh wait.
    - chappi42 13y ago
      ;-) But why not 'just steal' the markdown name? Afaik Gruber used the name for a software and not for a standard... A committee (codehorror, Github, marked, discount, Pandoc people etc.) could e.g. buy the markdown.org domain and start publishing new standards. I'd love to have a core which is the ~same what we have now and then extensions. The core could (very slightly) develop if necessary. It's not nice to take over names but why not? It's a pity to see Markdown rotting along since years :-(
afsina 13y ago
I think Markdown is mediocre. Putting too much meaning to white spaces is not exactly a bright idea for a markup language IMO.
johnnyc3po 13y ago
Writing is the future of writing.
koralatov 13y ago
Telling me there's an 30-second overview of Markdown at the end of this post, but not providing an anchor link to get there, and another to get back, is really sloppy. It's probably as a result of Markdown's ``intentionally really simple'' syntax. I write in Markdown all the time and I certainly don't know how to create an anchor link within it.
voyou 13y ago
The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of kludges to approximate formatting when using the technology of 1970s dumb terminals. Is that really the best writing system we can come up with? Clearly, it's not. One obvious improvement would be a system with the same semantics as markdown which presented these semantics using the standard typographical conventions everyone knows (italic for emphasis, larger text for headings, etc). A further improvement would be a more carefully thought through and richer semantics than the rather arbitrarily-chosen subset of HTML that markdown currently supports.

40 points by vinhnx 13y ago

As everyone has noted, good writing shouldn't be bogged down with syntax, yet the author proposes people ditch editors/bars and just write it directly? If you want that, just switch to source view and write. Otherwise, I'm quite content with working in a lightweight editor with keyboard shortcuts. Frankly, I prefer to format my text with HTML anyhow. Markdown is easier on the eyes, but it has limited function and is just another level of separation between what I write and what you see.

libovness 13y ago

The premise here that "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks" should be questioned. Who says that the content of the writing is necessarily so much more important than how it looks? There's a reason that books are meant to look nice - we enjoy the look and feel of them. Likewise, I enjoy reading things on certain blogs - e.g., The Verge, Medium, Grantland - because they look really great and it's a great reading experience. I'm almost tempted to think that it's the opposite - superpowerful WYSIWYG is the future of writing. End users will get to create amazing multimedia experiences. For better or worse, writing will be freed from being just about words.

zenojevski 13y ago
One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateurish, or downright tiring to read: differences in spacing, font, color, all these make for an awful end result which is also annoying to maintain[1]. All in all this is akin to provisioning instead of scripting: you declare _what you want_ (a pull-out quote) instead of _how to do it_, letting the compiler take care of the rest. The downside of markdown is that it is a two phase compose/preview system, which has been resolved with dual panes up to now. But it is not a showstopper, especially considering that professional copywriters already compose stories separate from presentation[2]. [1]: Yes, I know that Word has _styles_. Which are kind of similar in intent to markdown's #, >, *, even though they are not always semantically significant, and they also include presentation. [2]: InDesign's story editor: http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-editor.png http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-...

eksith 13y ago

The key takeaway : "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks"... which is arguably a bit difficult when you're manipulating raw HTML and a bit... detached on WISIWYG. Markdown allows sophisticated ideas to fall into text with a very simple syntax. I don't know of any other system that allows this except just plain text. Edit: Hmm... looks like agreeing with the article isn't popular for some reason.

ghayes 13y ago
The issue with Markdown is the syntax is pretty horrible. To create a link, it's [ title ] ( url ), which is incredibly unintuitive. I'm still never sure if italics are or * *. Heck, if I want a single newline, that's not possible. I am all for using a markup syntax; I just wish we had a better option than Markdown specifically. Additionally, Medium is specifically, heavily concerned with "how it looks" as that is one of the main selling points of the blog software.
- computeloops 13y ago
  reStructuredText is another option. It is quite powerful, but the syntax is little complex compared to Markdown. http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
- backprojection 13y ago
  Silly question: shouldn't be piss-simple to write with whatever syntax you like and parse it to markdown, with tools like Python?
- dchest 13y ago
  A single newline is possible, and it's the most horrible thing in Markdown: When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return. http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#p
  - 13y ago

peterarmstrong 13y ago

At Leanpub we bet the whole startup on Markdown, so we certainly agree! We love Markdown since it means that writers focus on writing, not on formatting...

donniezazen 13y ago

It baffles me that WordPress doesn't have Markdown by default.

eksith 13y ago
I think WP has a lot of historical reasons for sticking with an HTML based WYSIWYG. Also, they've spent a lot of time and effort customizing TinyMCE. If you like WordPress but want to keep things simple, you may like Habari : http://habariproject.org http://habariproject.org

jmduke 13y ago

The easiest counterargument possible: Good writing doesn't need syntax. Sinclair and Joyce and Fitzgerald and Twain didn't need italics or heading tags: just like structuring a post as a list is a sign of structural weakness, designating something with a header tag is admitting defeat, is admitting "Hey, look at this, this means something is happening over here." (I love Markdown, and use it daily.)

adregan 13y ago
Markdown is great for writing on the web, but it's not the future of writing. I love markdown, but all word processing is still so restrictive compared to earlier forms of composition, and HTML is still a horrible medium for poetry: Hannah Weiner used to manipulate the page in her typewriter for great effects in the 70s and 80s (http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/weiner_indians.pdf http://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/weiner_indians.pdf). Charles Olson called the page an open field in 1950 (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/237880 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/23788...). Our linear text flow doesn't allow for the kind of poetry that Apollinaire was making in the early 20th century (http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/Apollinaire_Calligrams.pdf http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/Apollinaire_Calligrams.p...). Heck, for that matter HTML can't even maintain line breaks or distinguish stanzas (should they be p tags?).
lifeformed 13y ago
Two different mediums. Fictional literature is about communicating with words in a book. Web articles are about communicating with words on the internet, which is much more visual, interactive, and malleable. If you can improve communication with proper formatting, go for it, if it fits the medium.

toolslive 13y ago

Suppose my writing includes tables, what do I do then?

kaeluka 13y ago
org-mode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJVLJd_gz0&feature=player_detailpage#t=182 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTJVLJd_gz0&feature=player_d...
- 616c 13y ago
  It is surprising that no one here mentioned org-mode yet. I am picking it up now and wonder why no one mentioned, as the whole plugin, as I have been told and what interested, is like the CLI version of Trello.
wingerlang 13y ago
"Mou" (an osx app) have got support for tables within its markdown.
awsm 13y ago
Markdown has tables: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Here-Cheatsheet#wiki-tables https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Here-C...
- toolslive 13y ago
  first sentence there: "Tables aren't part of the core Markdown spec, ...." Anyway somehow, padding the columns with spaces to align the pipes isn't workable. If I change the width on 1 line, the whole table has to be modified. Face it: in the current millennium, for serious writing, there's still nothing better than Latex. (which is a bit sad)
- Marazan 13y ago
  That's Markdown-Here, not Markdown.
chown 13y ago

quasque 13y ago

The idea the author is illustrating reminds me of this even simpler, no-distractions, plain text editor http://writer.bighugelabs.com/ http://writer.bighugelabs.com/ It works really well for me when just trying to get thoughts out into words. Then it's just a case of pasting it into a 'proper' editor later to work on the finer editing, formatting, and suchlike.

useflyer 13y ago

Markdown is like Vim -- sure, it might speed up your output, if that's your sole focus. And its not meant to be adopted en masse. I'm a designer and relatively intelligent person by trade, and I have a difficult time with markdown. It requires me to have a guide open, to be able to write. No "normal folks" I know can decipher markdown. The trick is to make styling easy -- not to make styling an afterthought. The writer, writing on Medium, should recognize this.

philjackson 13y ago
> relatively intelligent person by trade Interesting trade. Your place doesn't need someone of mediocre intelligence do they?

andmarios 13y ago

“Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks.” Usually this is the [type of] phrase we use to describe LaTeX.

ternaryoperator 13y ago
Really? That's not my experience with LaTeX at all: I (and others like me) am constantly looking up commands, special characters, parameters to commands, remembering to close braces, etc. And when things don't work as I or they expect, finding the problem is a nightmare. LaTeX is great for typesetting -- that is, when you want to focus on how it looks.
- andmarios 13y ago
  The problems you describe are a sign that you still haven't learned LaTeX. I never claimed there isn't a steep learning curve. But these problems haven't to do with the appearance of your document. Also you seem to miss the point of LaTeX. Of course you care how your documents look, this is one of the main reasons to use it. But you are smart enough to know that there are two parts in creating a document. The first is the content, this is your part, this is where your expertise lies. So you write and give some general instructions about the structure of your writings. The second part is the typesetting and this is LaTeX's work. A common pitfall is trying to use LaTeX as MS Word.

chmike 13y ago

Which markdown is he talking about ? There are no standard and each editor has it's own rules. Bullet lists? How do you make sub bullet lists ? Use tabs ? No tab on iPad. Tables ? There is a Markdown dialect for that. Markdown has limitations and needs to be standardized.

GuiA 13y ago
There is a reference syntax respected by all scrupulous editors [1]. It's a decentralized standard, sure, but it's compact and logical enough that it's unequivocally respected across the web. [1] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
- Marazan 13y ago
  Gruber's Markdown syntax has a bunch of ambiguities in it.
  - chmike 13y ago
    Yes. Thank you to point it out. That is what I meant by standardization. An effort to identify and sort out these ambiguities or missing features like how to escape * *, etc. I'm a fan user of Markdown, but I'm also frequently frustrated because it could be made so much more powerful and efficient while preserving the same initial spirit.
    - Marazan 13y ago
      Not only that but the "reference" implementation on the website has bugs in it that Gruber has fixed but for some reason he hasn't updated the file. If you know what to search for in the Markdown mailing list you can find his latest version but it is insane that it's not on the page.
jeena 13y ago
There was a attempt to do that www.w3.org/community/markdown/ But Gruber was childish about it: https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/261650083689426945 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800 https://twitter.com/gruber/status/262287246953164800

brianberns 13y ago

Markdown seems to be part of the retro/hipster trend, along with flat UIs, 8-bit video game music, fixie bikes, and Pabst beer. As someone who actually lived through the 1980s, it's amusing to watch you young cats reinvent my youth. I'm not saying Markdown is a bad idea, but I'm perfectly happy using the rich UI provided by a word processor when I write. Next thing you know, someone will claim that 80 characters max per line was a great idea, and there will be a little iPhone app that rings a bell when you get to column 75 so you can hit the carriage return in time. Non-skeuomorphically, of course.

Roboprog 13y ago
But, I like 80 column lines. Er, I guess that doesn't make sense with proportional fonts :-) Still, fill the page width, but use snaked columns if the page is wide or the font is small. I guess that's kind of like an 80 column rule.
DH61AG 13y ago
It's one of those retro things that just won't die.

Roboprog 13y ago

Yet, somehow all the WYSIWIG editors beat out nroff and WordPerfect. Personally, the trick to writing with a word processor is to not waste too much time on the formatting, and just write. Also, learn to use the "sytles", just like you use CSS in an HTML file. I first learned to do significant writing in a WYSIWIG editor using Samna/Lotus Ami (accent on the i). Then Word, then Open/Libre Office. All of these have style lists. Use them! Don't waste time clicking on all the fonts, sizes, spacing, etc block after block. The "Styles" menu seems to be one of the best kept secrets in Word and similar word processors.

justinator 13y ago

Before markdown (for me), there was Perl's POD. [0] Simple to pick up, does what it says on the tin, easy to hack in, "Do What I Want", for things missing. The tools for it are a little all over the place, but, "Turn this into HTML" (pod2html) works, and works well for documentation. Can you write whole books with it? People do - I believe many of the Perl books put out by O'Reilly are written in a POD dialect. [0]http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html

computeloops 13y ago

The upcoming Ghost[1] blogging platform/tool has side by side post editor that supports Markdown on left and visual formatting on right. This should make it easier to learn Markdown syntax. Also, I believe, Markdown is the best option for generating formatted content on touch based devices. [1]http://tryghost.org/features.html http://tryghost.org/features.html

est 13y ago
two-column layout is so last decade. Why hasn't anyone invented inline markdown editor yet? Your current cursor line should be markdown source in plain text, other lines rendered HTML.
- guynamedloren 13y ago
  Prose.io has kind of a hybrid markdown editor (I think it's WYSIWYM?). It has markdown syntax highlighting that happens to look similar to the final output, though the markdown tags are still displayed. They also have a toolbar, which is used like a regular WYSIWYG toolbar, but generates mardown tags. It's pretty neat.
- voyou 13y ago
  Why not render the current line in HTML too?

chappi42 13y ago

Markdown is a mess. Gruber refuses to take care and now there are a ton of slightly different dialects because the original draft is clearly lacking in some respects. Just last week wanted to use GFM, they introduced a new newline style. Or maybe not? In gollum it doesn't seem to be working and then there are breaking lines with two spaces. Or not? It's a desaster. Some group should take over the markdown format definition.

draegtun 13y ago
It's a shame Carl Sassenrath's MakeDoc didn't catch on (outside of the Rebol world at least). NB. MakeDoc was already 4 years old when Markdown was born. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeDoc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakeDoc
- eksith 13y ago
  That's interesting. Considering the similarity, I wonder if Markdown was influenced in part or whole by MakeDoc.
sausman 13y ago
Go for it. You could call it Topdown.
- bebna 13y ago
  Or Markup. Oh wait.
  - chappi42 13y ago
    ;-) But why not 'just steal' the markdown name? Afaik Gruber used the name for a software and not for a standard... A committee (codehorror, Github, marked, discount, Pandoc people etc.) could e.g. buy the markdown.org domain and start publishing new standards. I'd love to have a core which is the ~same what we have now and then extensions. The core could (very slightly) develop if necessary. It's not nice to take over names but why not? It's a pity to see Markdown rotting along since years :-(

afsina 13y ago

I think Markdown is mediocre. Putting too much meaning to white spaces is not exactly a bright idea for a markup language IMO.

johnnyc3po 13y ago

Writing is the future of writing.

koralatov 13y ago

Telling me there's an 30-second overview of Markdown at the end of this post, but not providing an anchor link to get there, and another to get back, is really sloppy. It's probably as a result of Markdown's ``intentionally really simple'' syntax. I write in Markdown all the time and I certainly don't know how to create an anchor link within it.

voyou 13y ago

The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of kludges to approximate formatting when using the technology of 1970s dumb terminals. Is that really the best writing system we can come up with? Clearly, it's not. One obvious improvement would be a system with the same semantics as markdown which presented these semantics using the standard typographical conventions everyone knows (italic for emphasis, larger text for headings, etc). A further improvement would be a more carefully thought through and richer semantics than the rather arbitrarily-chosen subset of HTML that markdown currently supports.