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> Markdown (.MD) is a text format that lazy people use to write HTML. Markdown is a markup language for relatively simple structured documents. You can convert
by ahoge 12y ago
> Markdown (.MD) is a text format that lazy people use to write HTML.
Markdown is a markup language for relatively simple structured documents. You can convert it to HTML, but you could as well convert it to something else.
> However that is where the use case ends. .MD is not a useful format for many other cases unless you want to prove to the programmers that you too can do tricky stuff in plain text. For the rest of us it has little value.
It's used by Reddit and some content management systems. Regular users don't have any problems with it. It's a lot easier to use than HTML and also more convenient to use than RTEs.
Markdown isn't for writing HTML. It's for writing the actual content.
I wrote about 100 articles in "raw" HTML. I surely don't miss those days. It was error prone and the tags added very distracting visual noise.
- Zarel 12y agoI'd disagree that regular users don't have any problems with it. One very common problem I've seen is a conversation like "How old are you?" "21." which Markdown interprets '21.' as a list and renumbers from 1, leading to: "How old are you?" "1." Another problem is that single linebreaks are ignored. Things like song lyrics and ASCII art get messed up, and some people even use single linebreaks for paragraphs. And even if you do use two linebreaks for paragraphs, there's still the problem that copy/pasting text will eliminate paragraph breaks since they're copy/pasted as one linebreak. I could go on, but the point is that Markdown is honestly not a very user-friendly way to format text on a discussion website.
- glomph 12y agoI agree with this. In 90% if cases where it actually formats anything on reddit it basically gets it wrong in terms of the users intentions.