3 ms·

> You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" ... Absolutely. You could've stopped there without any further caveats. The comment above I think is HN a

> You'd change your mind about "everybody knows HTML" ... Absolutely. You could've stopped there without any further caveats. The comment above I think is HN arrogance, assuming that the rest of the web is at a certain minimum level of tech literacy. So many people post facebook updates or online comments and don't what what HTML is. I know someone (relatively young, uses the internet daily) who doesn't know what a browser is. That aside, if given the choice, I would voluntarily use Markdown for comments all day long, no contest. For example a bullet/unordered list[1] needs so many awkward tags, whereas a Markdown list is much simpler, and much more intuitive for those who don't know HTML[2]. [1] http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_ul.asp [2] http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_markdown_primer_or_how_do_you_do_all_that/c03nik6 http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/6ewgt/reddit_mar...

VikingCoder 13y ago
I honestly feel that "white-space: pre-wrap" would get you there for 99.9% of the internet, who never even use markdown. How about the other 0.1%? Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? I mean, what are we, barbarians?! I'll note that the source to your Reddit article is 322 lines long! That'a lot to remember!
- patrickk 13y ago
  Well for reddit comments, the vast majority of the comments I typically make will make use of quotes, bold, italics or lists (the comments that include markdown), I use stuff like tables quite infrequently. So even remembering a small subset of the markdown will make my comments much more readable. I learn the features I use regularly, from reading other comments, that's how I picked up markdown originally. I'm learning Python, I don't expect to learn all the features, hopefully I will learn a small subset, enough to be dangerous! > Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? Absolutely, this is a good solution also. I personally like knowing the markdown features, I guess, but that's just me ;-) There is an extremely similar feature in the RES addon which allows live preview, not possible on a smaller screen though. It even includes a helpful list of markdown features for the newbie.

VikingCoder 13y ago

I honestly feel that "white-space: pre-wrap" would get you there for 99.9% of the internet, who never even use markdown. How about the other 0.1%? Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? I mean, what are we, barbarians?! I'll note that the source to your Reddit article is 322 lines long! That'a lot to remember!

patrickk 13y ago
Well for reddit comments, the vast majority of the comments I typically make will make use of quotes, bold, italics or lists (the comments that include markdown), I use stuff like tables quite infrequently. So even remembering a small subset of the markdown will make my comments much more readable. I learn the features I use regularly, from reading other comments, that's how I picked up markdown originally. I'm learning Python, I don't expect to learn all the features, hopefully I will learn a small subset, enough to be dangerous! > Well, why not a WYSIWYG editor (similar to that on Stack Overflow) that generates HTML? Absolutely, this is a good solution also. I personally like knowing the markdown features, I guess, but that's just me ;-) There is an extremely similar feature in the RES addon which allows live preview, not possible on a smaller screen though. It even includes a helpful list of markdown features for the newbie.