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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

I'm sold. Is it a (near or full) replacement for markdown?

I can't think of a single thing it can't do that markdown can do, but I can think of several things it does that markdown doesn't do.

Main problem (as I note in another message) is lack of feature parity in non-Emacs implementations and lack of quality html renderers outside of Emacs.

> I can't think of a single thing it can't do that markdown can do

Be human-readable, for starters.

That's subjective. I know org-mode and prefer it. The people espousing the intrinsic comparative readability of Markdown all appear to be deeply steeped in that world.

For me the org-mode syntax is more logical than Markdown—and I can have cross references.

You know org mode and prefer it, fair enough. To someone unfamiliar with both syntaxes, Markdown is much easier to grasp; because it's simpler it's just more readable.

Is that true because you're privy to the results of that experiment? Or is it true because you're most comfortable with Markdown and are starting from the unshakable belief that Markdown is intrinsically easier?

To be honest, Markdown feels simpler because it's quite less featured than Org.

If you put a Markdown document and an Org document implementing only what Markdown can, there's no readability difference between the two as I know both markup style fairly well.

Org Mode has a lot more functionality than Markdown. A document that only uses features present in Markdown seems to me just as readable in either format.

Which markdown? :-P

Some markdowns have some nice features:

- Fenced code blocks, which I would prefer to prefixing with colons (update: oh I guess org-mode has an equivalent! good)

- Footnote support

- Definition list support (<dl><dt></dt><dd></dd></dl>)

Additionally, it should be noted that Markdown allows usage of any HTML you want and it will be passed through. In practice this is often sanitized or escaped, but not always. On GitHub, for example, you are perfectly free to use <sup>, <detail><summary>, and so on.

Update Nice, Org-Mode does all that? Then that is a strong advantage over Markdown, where you never know which parts of which flavor will work on what site. (Heck, we can’t even get GitHub and StackOverflow to treat code blocks similarly.)

Org mode handles footnotes:

    some text [fn:1]

    [fn:1] this is where the footnote text goes

The one thing that I find weird is that if you convert to HTML using pandoc, those appear after an <hr>, but in the org mode itself, they'll appear as children of the previous sub-heading.

org-mode has all the features you mentioned. Following gives you fenced code blocks:

  #+begin_src c
  printf("%d", 1);
  #+end_src

it has both named and unnamed footnotes [1]. You can use '::' in a list item to create a description list, like so:

  + coffee :: a dark, bitter, stimulating beverage
  + tea :: a beverage with effects similar to but milder than coffee
  + beer :: an alcoholic drink made from grains

[1]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Footnotes.html

```...``` is about ten times easier to write and twice as readable as #+begin_tok ... #+end_tok.

It does look easier, but in practice one edits org-mode docs in Emacs so typing the three keystrokes s<[Tab] at the beginning of a line produces:

    #+BEGIN_SRC 

    #+END_SRC

The cursor is left at the end of the first line where one presumably types the word python or c or shell or whatever language you'd like the code block to be treated as.

Once editing the code block, typing C-' takes you to a dedicated editing pane that runs in an emacs major mode most appropriate for the language being edited, with full Emacs programming language support. It's really painless, other than learning Emacs first, (LOL, but honestly really worth it).

Easier to write, yes, but only outside of emacs (and anything with good snippet support). Within emacs, <s TAB expands to

  #+BEGIN_SRC |
  
  #+END_SRC

with the cursor placed to specify a language.

As for readability, I don't think it's clear at all that ```...``` beats

  #+BEGIN_SRC perl
  ...
  #+END_SRC

* * *

As it turns out, I hadn't refreshed the page for hours, and someone else said pretty much the same five hours before.

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