5 ms·
> They are all as complicated if not more complicated than just writing HTML. They all have a bunch of rules and special cases. I'd rather just write in HTML wh
by cespare 12y ago
> They are all as complicated if not more complicated than just writing HTML. They all have a bunch of rules and special cases. I'd rather just write in HTML which I already know.
I find that Markdown is significantly easier/faster to write than HTML and, more importantly, easier to read in its un-rendered form. To me (and presumably lots of other people, given Markdown's ubiquity) it's well worth learning the relatively small syntax.
Edit: Here's a quick comparison with a README.md from one of my projects:
Rendered: https://github.com/cespare/reflex/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/cespare/reflex/blob/master/README.md
Markdown: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cespare/reflex/master/README.md https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cespare/reflex/master/READ...
HTML: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cespare/ad6c41aa28583cac8b2c/raw/98f0da452068a0db2719002d0b0fd0654dd5faf4/md.html https://gist.githubusercontent.com/cespare/ad6c41aa28583cac8...
Three things I notice from this example:
- The verbosity of an XML syntax with HTML is annoying, particularly the need for closing tags. <code>xyz</code stands out as particularly verbose (compared with `xyz`).
- Having to escape certain characters like & makes this HTML sample harder to read (this is more of a problem with technical/code documents).
- Automatic linkification prevents stuttering: <a href="http://example.com">http://example.com</a> http://example.com">http://example.com</a>
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- canadev 12y agoI haven't seen it used outside of Rails apps, but have you ever tried Slim? I understand there's a similar tool for Node.js called Jade. http://slim-lang.com/ http://slim-lang.com/ table tr th Col1 Header! th Col2 Header! tr td Col1 Value... td Col2 Value... Renders to HTML.
- RobertKerans 12y agoSlim/Jade/HAML etc are templating languages, they're not designed for writing text at all - they're almost the opposite of markdown et all.
- canadev 12y agoI wouldn't say they're the opposite of Markdown, but that's not really the point I was getting at anyway. The poster I was replying to was saying that two of his issues with using HTML to write documents were the verbosity and the escaping. Slim solves those two issues.
- RobertKerans 12y agoAh, apologies, point taken. Note that most of that style of templating language include markdown filters as well - so you drop :markdown in, then just write a block of text, works really well.