Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different.

The word standardization gets abused a lot in our industry. Usually it implies something that 1) has a non ambiguous specification, 2) is widely used. 3) is endorsed by some standards body or cross industry organization or simply so widely used that it effectively is a standard 4) has multiple independent implementations (tools, parsers, websiters, etc.)

Org-mode has a specification (https://orgmode.org/); is at this point in time not widely used; has not been endorsed or proposed to a standards body like e.g. w3c, ietf, etc.; has a very limited amount of implementations. Declaring it a standard is meaningless until that is fixed.

The Github flavor of markdown has a decent specification (https://github.github.com/gfm/), many implementations of e.g. parsers for different languages, many websites/tools/etc. using it. It's not at this point a formal standard but the previous makes it more or less a de-facto industry standard that is widely used, with a reference OSS implementation and many other parsers aiming to be compatible.

If you are implementing markdown support, you could do worse than pick this flavor. Several other flavors are equally well specified, have similarly good tool support and industry endorsement, and might very well be considered standards in their own right.

Of course, like with Json, there's a long tail of not so great parsers that have implementation specific bugs/quirks/omissions/features, etc.

> Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different.

Just a minor note on this: Org-mode was created in 2003 (the syntax a bit earlier) and Markdown in 2004, so I think this was a case of parallel evolution, each unaware of the other, not intentional deviation.

Edit: And the use cases were different. Org was designed as a syntax for an outliner, and Markdown was designed as a syntax for prose. Both are plain text and optimized for readability in their pre-processed form, but maybe it's the fact that they are so similar that's remarkable.

The point is that as soon as one project looked like it was gaining critical mass, the other project should have conceded defeat and adopted the winning format. Because as we all know, the major problem with open source is there can be more than one of something.

They do not have the same features, and undoubtably the reason for that is because some users needed features the other doesn't have.

you are implying that there is a standardized markdown flavor. pretty much every parser forks the "standard". even though markdown-ish is more common than org-mode, i don't think there is a clear winner here. common standards do emerge from open source, but we have to let the competition play out until the end. and tbfh, you aren't playing the game correctly if you just give up and die without overwhelming proof that your project in irrelevant.

That is a ridiculous notion. People like myself escaped to free software in order to avoid the imposition of a vision by a single corporate entity, like you have with MS/Apple.

People are not uniform, they don't all like the same music, books etc. so why should this not be true for tools?

In his original documentation for Markdown, Gruber acknowledges an number of influences. Mostly common plaintext email conventions of the time, but also Setext, reStructuredText, and more by name.

He did not include reference to org-mode, so he probably did not know of it at the time. (Although maybe Aaron Swartz was familiar with org-mode, and provided cross-pollination?)

Most likely as you mentioned, md and org both evolved independently from similar ancestors

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

Org-mode does fill the primary use-case for Markdown that I’ve seen, since GitHub will render it just like they do Markdown.

The small slice of Org-mode demonstrated in this article might look like just a Markdown clone, but within Emacs you can do things like a Jupypter notebook with Org-Babel, which GitHub renders statically. Granted, it’s possible to do these things without Emacs (or a watered down plugin for another editor).

Superficially org looks similar to markdown, but the kinds of manipulations you can do with TODO lists, calendars, tables within emacs is like magic. It's nothing like markdown when you use it this way.

> Org-mode looks very similar to markdown. Almost so that I would call it pointlessly different.

Only at the very basic feature set of Org mode. But Org also allows for properties, and tags, and timestamps, and deadlines, etc. etc.

I would point out this as the standard without GitHub extensions: https://commonmark.org

Github flavor spec specifies it is a strict superset of that. But you are right to mention this.

I agree that Org-mode and Markdown are pointlessly different! The latter has no excuse for existing, given that the former both long predates it in time and vastly exceeds it in power.

One could say the same about Usenet and Hacker News. Yet here we are.

> given that the former both long predates it in time

Org-mode's initial release was in 2003 (I can't find a specific month); Markdown's was in March 2004. So Org-mode predates Markdown by about a year. Personally, as someone who is not an Emacs user, I heard of Markdown years before I ever heard of Org-mode.

No reason at all, except a robust, complete implementation not hopelessly tied to a particular editor.

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