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Comment by scambier | Hacker News Reader

Markdown is at a sweet spot that combines ease of read and write for technical and non-technical users. It's primarily made to be written and shared as-is.

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"Markdown is at a sweet spot that combines ease of read and write for technical and non-technical users."

Not in my purely anecdotal experience. While many (but not all) developers like markdown, I've yet to come across non-technical users who like it (tolerate it perhaps, but not like).

I don't like Markdown for non-technical users.

On Reddit, I frequently see mistakes caused by Markdown behaving unexpectedly. Common problems include:

- "How old are you?" "52." gets renumbered into "How old are you?" "1.".

- People using single linebreaks for poetry and song lyrics, and being confused when they get collapsed into a single line.

GitHub Flavored Markdown _does_ fix both these problems, but for some reason, regular Markdown is a lot more common, even when targeting non-technical users.

Always thought that Markdown was primarily made to convert to HTML.

The point is that it's easy to write and easy to parse. It doesn't matter what your emitter is.

Sweet spot as long as you don’t want anything basic like using colors. In my experience Markdown has been about as much painful and frustrating than helpful.

Color isn't really that basic a thing - you need to take into account the medium that the color will be displayed in to do it correctly.

However, as Markdown is supposed to be nothing more than a superset of HTML, you can simply reach for CSS. It won't always render the best if you're moving from Markdown to physical medium, but that's largely dependent on the engine.

I very rarely, if ever, encounter markdown inputs where markdown is a superset of HTML. Almost always script tags and various other sorts of active content are stripped at the very least.

If certain tags are being stripped, then you're probably in a position where arbitrary input isn't desirable.

If this is an input to a website, for example, the webmaster really doesn't desire everyone to be able to reinvent the blink tag, or be able to express everything in rainbow fonts.

In which case Markdown shines, for it's ability to express simple markup, that can be safely expressed.

Well, (raw) Markdown is about content, not form. I don't have any example on the top of my head when color is part of content, but if that's a common use case of yours, text processors are probably a better tool than Markdown.

Markdown expects to be written to 80 columns or less. It doesn't have to be but that it what's expected. Which makes it very much about form as you have to manually "form"at it.

> Markdown expects to be written to 80 columns or less

Not at all.

You can use colors - like in html and css you keep style and structure separate. If you want all your heading 2 blue, for example, than you can use h2 { color: blue; } and so on and so forth.

PS: By the way, you are currently commenting in text without colors - how do you feel?

Commenting of HN is very different than writing educational context. Colors made it really easier to show correspondences in-between languages, especially when they are in different order. I also had the problem the other day when writing software documentation (imagine code portion without colors... hopefully in this case third party lib are doing the job).

You (and other posters) can ironize as much as they want, the truth is dealing with colored text in Markdown is equals to inputting raw HTML, as which point mixing the two markup languages is more painful than going raw HTML.

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