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Markdown and all the other Markdown-esque formats need to be consigned to the history books. No really. It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on ea
by billpg 12y ago
Markdown and all the other Markdown-esque formats need to be consigned to the history books.
No really. It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on each side of words in text boxes when we want to emphasize something. Are we cavemen?
(Following was added after initial posting)
Technology has moved on. We should no longer need to remember which combination of magic symbols we need to make a bulleted list or whatever.
There are often helpers to insert those magic symbols. That's great, but then why keep showing us the magic symbols? Do you want me to care that s represent italics? Will including this second cause this fragment to be italicized? How do you show an asterisk without it meaning intalics? Grrr...
- krapp 12y ago>Are we cavemen? Well, essentially, yes. What do you suggest we use, then?
- billpg 12y agoOne of those text-entry boxes with buttons for emphasis, list items, etc.
- krapp 12y agoHacker News seems to have a weird fetish for its 'minimalist' UI ... probably because it has a higher than typical ratio of users who spend time behind a terminal, and due to some underlying belief that the lack of bells and whistles keeps the normies away. If they added a rich text editor there would probably be a riot. But to be fair, at least markdown is a lot cleaner than bbcode.
- billpg 12y agoI should probably point out before someone else does, that my own blog, hackensplat.com, is one of those very websites I'm complaining about. In my defence, its just a blogger.com hosted site and I'm using their comment system. I want forms to either accept plain text and allow angle brackets and stars, or accept HTML and provide an interface that hides the HTML tags. We only need Markdown and their ilk for the last generation of websites (including mine) that are behind the times.
- Turing_Machine 12y agoOr maybe people who write code for a living a) don't find it difficult to remember that fencing text with asterisks gives you italics and b) fencing text with asterisks is far, far faster than taking your hands off the keyboard and playing swoopy/pointy/clicky with a mouse.
- JetSpiegel 12y agoThere are in fact programs that don't run in the browser. Schocking, I know. But wait, there's more! Some programs don't even use Javascript!
- wtbob 12y ago> It is almost 2015 and we are still typing symbols on each side of words in text boxes when we want to emphasize something. That's called markup. It's what HTML is; it's what any plain-text format is. And it's a good thing: it's interchangeable and archiveable.
- billpg 12y agoHTML is great, mostly because it actually does the job and knows its place. Markdown and their ilk are all trying to be sorta-not-quite-HTML, but fail precisely because they are not HTML.