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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person that gets annoyed that every single site wants to implement their own special and incompatible subset of markdown? Yes, I'm looking at you HackerNews, who makes it hard to block quote.

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HN doesn't even attempt to support Markdown. It's just happenstance that a couple of formatting options are similar.

HN's doc on formatting: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

But on other sites, yes, it's very irritating that I can't count on support for things like tables or checkboxes because those are extensions to Markdown and not part of CommonMark or the original reference everyone implemented from. Or how some sites get finnicky about whitespace around list items.

> HN doesn't even attempt to support Markdown. It's just happenstance that a couple of formatting options are similar.

In particular, for a website that heavily covers software and engineering, it's a pain that it doesn't have a good way to format code.

``` this should be formatted as four lines of code with line breaks at every newline without having to indent every line with spaces ```

I wonder why this is. Is it because there aren't enough HN users who would actually use markdown formatting (I know I would!), because it's too much work to implement, because "if it ain't broke...", or for any other reason?

The one and only reason I feel like that's not _such_ a bad thing is that once you do that, you know more people will drop tons of code samples in posts making the discussion a lot less easy to browse.

    Currently people often use these code block-ish things for quoting text, for lack of a better option.

This is completely unreadable on mobile for lines of any significant length, because the block itself is a box about half the width of the screen that doesn't wrap and must be scrolled horizontally.

Minimal features and css are all well and good as long as they work properly ;)

HN can't even display more than like 200 comments on a single page without melting down, so don't be too surprised.

It's the same idea even if they don't call it markdown. It's yet another formatting language to learn and occasionally confuse with similar things on other sites, and will occasionally bite you when you least expect it.

For example:

I never shop at WalMart because WalMart doesn't pay their workers a living wage.

Author here: Absolutely. Or how apps like Notion "eat" Markdown, turning it into Rich text when you paste it in but then if you copy the text you pasted, you don't get the Markdown copy but instead get their rich text conversion.

Also amazes me how Markdown basically has become a generic term—Slack referred to their plain text markup as "markdown" when it was actually closer to Textile (with single underscores for italics and single asterisks for bold, versus single of either for Markdown italics and double of either for bold).

That's perhaps the greatest downside to Markdown is that you have to almost check your copy and see how it looks in many web apps (seems native Mac/iOS apps are more likely to implement it well).

Markdown was such a great idea.

Now it's fractured so much it's just a pain. Is this vanilla markdown or am I in Github markdown? Or my wiki markdown?

This is why I don't use Markdown: There is no such thing as Markdown. There are 1000 different parsers that have the word 'Markdown' in their names, but that's chaos, not a format.

I need features Gruber's Markdown doesn't support, so I have to use some other 'flavor' of Markdown. Ten years from now, how am I going to even know what to use to parse those files?

So now I just use org-mode for everything. It's more obscure (because Emacs) but there aren't 1000 different flavors of it.

CommonMark is not trivial to implement efficiently... and not all sites need as much functionality as CommonMark provides. So, would you prefer sites to invent something completely weird and new each time, or use something more familiar that looks like a subset of markdown? Sure, it can be done better or worse, but I don't think the concept is wrong. But honestly, many comment systems only have italics, quotes, lists, urls and maybe code, bold text and images... most of which have been indicated in plain txt files for a long time in quite consistent ways, hardly Markdown's trademark markup.

At the risk of inciting the wrath of HN:

  <script src="https://unpkg.com/showdown/dist/showdown.min.js"></script>

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