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Comment by _ZeD_ | Hacker News Reader

sigh I never understood why markdown (given it's lack of formal spec) "won" the light markup battle... I still think restructuredtext is syntactically better equipped and pleased to read...

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3 reasons (for me)... all of this are harder to write and to remember in restructured text: source code blocks, links and images. Also sections definition is totally fuzzy for me http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtex...

Markdown can work more like your mind. Restructured text is still too much like programming.

I agree on the section definitions. It's very hard to remember which underline I need to use because every project (or even document) can just define their own order implicitly. The sphinx project recommends a specific order somewhere in their documentation that I look up every time I need to write rst, but markdowns just-count-the-hashes is much easier.

I personally prefer Asciidoc(tor). The syntax for the basic stuff (headings, source code, links) is at least as easy as for markdown, but it also allows more advanced cases (tables, splitting into files, text substitutions, etc.) without resorting to writing html or using external tools. Asciidoctor also directly supports the markdown style for headings, block quotes, etc.

I see markdown more for writing a quick note or something that will not exceed a few pages.

Probably because it was designed by a writer, for use by writers as-is, inspired by existing plain-text email conventions.

Other light markup formats were designed by programmers, primarily for computer consumption, with readability by humans as a secondary goal.

This ^

It's a people problem, not a tech problem. I love writing in markdown because when I write, my mind works differently than when I code.

Ideally I could do anything that sort of feels right and the computer will just figure it out.

Markdown is the closest to that^ that I've ever used. It gets out of my way, which is what I want from a tool.

The lack of pure fancy spec is a feature

There are some cases where it fails, and those are ones where it makes no sense from a plain text perspective: two spaces at the end of line for a line break, and the image syntax (especially when you want the image as a link).

My guess would be because there is no Github Flavored reSturcturedText or anything similar. When large organizations that make software used by lots of people pick one of the options, it greatly increases the chances that that option will "win" over other, potentially better, options.

Same here. Nothing can be built upon Markdown mostly because it allows raw html. Many nice and solid extensions have been made for rst.

Not true. I personally built a markdown extension to be able to use classes. Still escaped all html.

You don't have to allow raw HTML in your Markdown. It's just nice when you have trusted input (e.g. writing a blog).

If you don't allow raw HTML, markdown doesn't support underline. I've run into this more than once with users.

I guess that's a feature. Underlines on the web usually denominate a link, so offering underlines for non-links would just confuse readers needlessly.

(inb4 "But my use-case is different." Yes it is, but I'm talking about the web in general.)

To quote rule #10 of Butterick's Practical Typography[1][2]:

Never use underlining, unless it’s a hyperlink.

[1] http://practicaltypography.com/summary-of-key-rules.html

[2] http://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html

Users want what they want. I'm using markdown for a question text within an Android questionnaire system, and my users are MDs who don't like to be told "no, underlining is a bad idea", so our markdown is littered with <u></u>

I found RST quite brittle (single underscore vs double underscore?) and hard to remember/type.

Markdown is generally less expressive (I would love if MD had RST's "include" directive) but I find it much easier to format a doc in MD.

Markdown won for me because I never had to learn to use it; I just write text like I'd be writing it anyway, having grown up on plain-text email and the like, and for the most part it just works.

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