Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I'm iffy on this kind of thing. Markdown has the advantage of looking roughly like what you'd do in plain text and is completely readable in plain text with no processing. It also has the advantage of being nearly standard; it is used on thousands of sites, including some very large ones (e.g. reddit, github, etc.). If I wanted my users to memorize HTML tags I would have just gone with HTML.

This seems to have the negatives of both Markdown and HTML, and no unique advantages over either. It's a little less verbose than HTML, but you have to know HTML tags (and Sundown syntax) to use it, and I have my doubts it can avoid the quirks Markdown has because converting any "friendly" markup to a formal syntax like HTML is always prone to quirks. It has the alleged advantage over Markdown of being able to use HTML and Sundown together...but, some Markdown processors also allow mixing MD and HTML, so this is not a unique benefit (this is quirky in Markdown, but I suspect it's quirky in Sundown, too).

Maybe I'm missing the benefit here, but it seems like a technical solution to a people problem, and that almost never works.

Also, as an aside, it's got the same name as a Markdown processor that is even mentioned in the article! That seems bound to cause confusion, given the similarities in purpose.

Comparing this to markdown just seems completely off the, er, mark. It's more like a simplified version of HTML, which has been done many times before, e.g. https://github.com/padolsey/SIML

Agreed. Perhaps perhaps the author should consider, er, marketing this as an alternative to raw HTML rather than to Markdown.

Author here.

> Maybe I'm missing the benefit here

Sundown is useful because it lets you abstract your custom server-side HTML tags. In other words, you can extend the language very easily.

For example, you can create a tag called "note" and use that instead of repeating HTLM, CSS and even JS:

    <s:tag name="note">
        <div style="color:red;">
            Note: {{@content}}!!
        </div>
    </s:tag>

And then call your new tag using the HTML syntax or Sundown:

    <note>Sundown is awesome ;)</note>
    :note Sundown is awesome :)

Result:

    <div style="color:red">Note: Sundown is awesome :)!!</div>

Sundown is just an HTML preprocessor (like Markdown) once it is transformed to HTML it's the SunSed language that compiles all the custom HTML tags to executable format.

I can see the use case you're going for. As others have mentioned though, this value is not coming as an alternative to markdown but rather an enhancement to HTML in a different use case.

Feels kind of like Sundown:HTML::SCSS:CSS. If you can communicate this (vs being an improvement on markdown), you'll probably get people to take a closer look.

You are right. Thank you for the insight! How about this:

Sundown and Markdown are both HTML preprocessors with different goals.

Not all markdown processors implement inline HTML, which I learned to my detriment recently (the "markdown" package on npm doesn't).

Exactly. Most Markdown processors don't implement this feature because it is very unpredictable and has too many contradictory edge cases.

... which makes Markdown even _less_ like your software. Also less relevant to marketing efforts as people up-thread are saying. Some of the use-cases that you're covering with your software were never covered by Markdown, nor were they ever intended to be use-cases for Markdown. So you're not going to find people that are currently using Markdown that will need Sundown for those use-cases.

Honestly I see no reason to even mention markdown. Sundown really has nothing to do with it. Just state why it's an improvement over HTML in various scenarios.

This makes it very different from Markdown to the point of it not making sense to compare the two, I think. Markdown is not a programming language or a template language (though people often overlay some sort of template processing after processing the Markdown into HTML in order to apply styles to the resulting HTML, e.g. for many static site generators this is the case...but the Markdown processor has no knowledge of that or concern for it).

I feel like this is more much comparable to, as others note, something like Jade/Pug, than Markdown. And, it may be a very good competitor to those sorts of tools, I dunno.

Seems like Sundown is a programmers tool; Markdown is an end user tool (often used by programmers in contexts where they don't want to program, like commenting on forums and tickets and such). But, I guess they are all just taking some sort of input and spitting out some HTML. It just seems like Markdown isn't the right thing to compare it to.

> Sundown is useful because it lets you abstract your custom server-side HTML tags. In other words, you can extend the language very easily.

So it's XML and XSL.

But we have HAML and PUG for this already (HTML preprocessors)

I also don't think his quams about performance apply to commonmark. It benchmarks quite fast

Yeah, I was also confused by using a project that's been unmaintained for several years as the pinnacle of Markdown performance, but I have never once thought about the performance of Markdown parsers (I can imagine someone on the scale of reddit or github would care about performance of the MD parser, but I never have for my projects) so I don't know enough to argue about whether performance has improved since then.

At SunSed we provide a cloud IDE to our users so they can easily update their website. Every time they make a change the IDE automatically saves the file and on the server we had to compile Markdown -> HTML+SunSed(custom HTML tags) -> Executable. Not to mention bulk website upload, backups and restores (a website could have thousands of pages). Markdown was the slowest part with the most resource usage.

I actually bench marked all of the Markdown implementatinos back in 2016 (or early 2017). https://github.com/vmg/sundown was by far the fastest!

Either way, is performance really an issue when dealing with Markdown? My uneducated guess is that in 99.99% of cases it's no issue.

sure, you don't want it blocking an event loop like the live preview in-browser while you're typing. or a node process.

Why not use Jade?

Its called pug now, and you're right, it seems like a reimplementation of jade/pug

Good question.

Aside from the difference in syntax (which is huge), I would say convenience.

SunSed = Hosting + IDE + CDN + a new programming language + Layout and Template system (like Jekyll and Hugo) + Many built-in tags to abstract things like embedding Youtube videos in a responsive way (which is not easy -- requires so many div wrappers).

You can also create your own tags and share it with others. I have started the process of creating tags for useful and popular libraries:

https://github.com/sunsed

If you know HTML, you already know the syntax of SunSed programming language, and can create fast dynamic websites with ease by abstracting your website content in custom HTML tags!

After all, SunSed is a programmable website builder.

I think when people are saying, “why not use X?” They mean, why not adopt X as your templating language system integrated into SunSed, instead of making your own.

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