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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

It's funny to watch Markdown gradually reinvent HTML as it originally was (though with much more readable syntax)

And I don't actually think that's a bad thing, so long as it stops there. HTML has become much more than documents, so having a constrained subset dedicated to documents is helpful.

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I'm personally very conservative about what I want added to markdown. I use it heavily because it doesn't provide me too many options.

That said, links and references are a nice thing to have done well.

I use Joplin to take notes, it's Markdown-based and it also includes some interesting extras like Mermaid support for diagrams.

http://joplinapp.org/

https://mermaid-js.github.io/

HTML doesn't have footnotes, does it?

It basically does. You can use anchors to approximate the behavior described here (it will be more verbose, but that's to be expected)

HTML 5 has the aside tag, which has the semantics of footnotes.

"Aside" is very rarely used as a footnote, and doesn't inherently have footnote semantics.

Not even in W3C's rather underrepresented suggested usage (as distinguished from common practice):

The objective of this technique is to use the HTML5 aside element to indicate that it's content is tangentially related to the main article or a parent section. The aside element represents a section of a page that consists of content that could be considered separate from that content. Such sections are often represented as sidebars in printed typography.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_the_aside_element_to_in...

https://awkawk.github.io/using_aside_content.html

Dive Into HTML5 anaogises <aside> to sidebars:

The aside element represents a section of a page that consists of content that is tangentially related to the content around the aside element, and which could be considered separate from that content. Such sections are often represented as sidebars in printed typography. The element can be used for typographical effects like pull quotes or sidebars, for advertising, for groups of nav elements, and for other content that is considered separate from the main content of the page.

http://diveintohtml5.info/semantics.html

> Dive Into HTML5 anaogises <aside> to sidebars:

However, ctrl+f footnote doesn't return anything. What's the current best practice for writing footnotes with semantic html? If I were to implement footnotes with <aside>, how would it look like?

> What's the current best practice for writing footnotes with semantic html? If I were to implement footnotes with <aside>, how would it look like?

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/semantics-other.html#...

Well, that's just all kinds of wrong.

That's the thing: there really isn't one.

It frankly boggles my mind that a markup language created by and for academics has neither footnotes nor formulae as first-class features.

To the extent that Markdown does implement a specific footnote syntax, it's actually ahead of HTML in that regard.

I think people are referring to the practice of effectively creating footnotes with HTML anchor tags [1]

[1] http://karlwinegardner.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-create-fo...

To be fair, it is simpler than HTML. Like Java vs. Python. You can sure do a lot with Java, but sometimes you just want the beauty of Python without injection, ya know?

I don't understand how you can say that. Markdown is massively more complicated than the equivalent HTML. HTML syntax is simple: Every gizmo is expressed as a <tag> and optionally an end </tag>, there are escapes for <, > and &, and that's all that ever needs escaping.

Markdown, on the other hand, has a syntax that is ever expanding. It's all exceptions to exceptions to exceptions (exceptions all the way down).

For example, what happens if in a markdown document talking about regular expressions you have this text: [^A-Za-z]. Will it be interpreted as a footnote? Or is it an exception? Who knows, only trial and error will tell.

And it may be handled differently between the many "flavors" of markdown!

In my experience, with decent editor assistance to help with boilerplate, closing html tags, etx. I enjoy writing simple docs more in html

You're talking about parsing/syntax, but what matters here is semantics. (Normal) Markdown maps to a small subset of all possible HTML tags, most of them on the simpler end of things, and that makes its overall scope and semantics simpler than those of HTML, even if its syntax is not.

Means and ends. If your means are complex, but the ends you are achieving are simple, then you're not getting good value for money. If I am to abide complex syntax then I'd better get sophisticated, powerful semantics in return.

HTML 1.0 (no CSS, no JS, no floats) is very similar in scope to Markdown. I wish every site that uses Markdown would allow me to write something like HTML 1.0 instead. It would be so much easier, at least for me.

The whole point of machines is to do tedious or hard work so people don't have to.

I don't think it's really about parsing/syntax. Or, rather, it is, but that has implications not just for the person writing a markdown parser or renderer, but for the person writing documents in markdown as well.

With HTML, I know that anything inside angle brackets won't get shown, because that's a directive to the rendering engine to do something. Put another way, only <, >, and I guess & are special and need to be escaped if I want to use them. Everything else will show up as I've typed it.

With markdown, a future feature addition could actually change the layout or structure of an existing document, because arbitrary characters (and sequences of characters) mean particular things. Previously, [^1] was a hyperlink to somewhere else (assuming I put "[^1]: https://wherever.com" somewhere else on the page). Now it's a link to that "[^1]: https://whatever.com" text on the same page. This change may have broken existing documents.

Keep in mind that it’s not all about simplicity. One of the selling points of MarkDown is that it’s legible even when left in its plain text source format.

HTML is ugly when left in its source format.

I'd wager that GitHub is one of the biggest publishers of larger-than-bite-sized Markdown documents, and this "selling point" (an argument which I both agree with about [original] Markdown and agree that this is a good property) is pretty much untrue for any given piece you'll find on GitHub. This is thanks to several factors including "GitHub-Flavored Markdown" differing so wildly from the original flavor, and the typical GitHub user just not giving a shit about how the raw form looks—treating it as just another non-WYSIWYG formatting language in the vein of HTML or TeX, since all they're really after most of the time is for their README to work as a substitute for a product landing page.

Pug is HTML but beautiful and more powerful, I’m surprised it hasn’t been brought up.

The best format I’ve found to author web pages, though, is definitely MDSvex [1], which is essentially markdown with built in syntax highlighting for code blocks, vanilla HTML if needed, and Svelte / Svelte components for any reactivity / reusable components if JS is needed. Stick some pug in the Svelte Component and I’ve got unlimited power in a beautiful, readable syntax with 0 boilerplate, all compiling to vanilla HTML and optionally hydrating JS. Love it!

[1] https://mdsvex.com

Markdown hasn't changed a bit from its reference implementation, it can't.

Everybody who grabbed onto Markdown and is forking it because they're realizing that it was a very simple tool to solve one man's blogging problem and ignored all the other more comprehensive LWMLs is reinventing HTML.

GitHub-flavored Markdown is different; it's almost taken over as the de-facto standard. There are lots of wacky extensions out there, but this isn't just another one of those.

What's interesting about that is that John Gruber uses footnotes extensively in his own blog posts (and has since approximately 2005), but chooses to implement them with HTML snippets rather than having created a dedicated Markdown syntax for them.

For example, see https://daringfireball.net/2005/07/footnotes.text

Just use restructured text (rST) already.

No, asciidoctor! Asciidoctor is the most intuitive markup format there is (except maybe Pollen, but that’s a non starter for most people).

Also, rST can’t even do bold italics.

Nothing beats org-mode.

Yeah, Org mode has supported footnotes since 2008:

https://github.com/bzg/org-mode/commit/40a149354c4e5992abac4...

If only I could have it in any other way than emacs...

Makes me wonder, since there is evil mode and opinionated Emacs disributions like Spacemacs und Doom Emacs, whether there is a potential for an org-mode focussed and optimized Emacs distribution.

Ease of use should be one of the core goals, then.

I would love that but then again org-noter and pdftools compliment base org-mode nicely.

Yeah, the lack of nested formatting in rST is crazy. For me it's annoying I can't just do a simple monospace formatted link in pure rST. Sphinx helps a bit with that depending on what you want to link, but it's not really controllable at the rST level like it is in other markup.

Yes... I do like asciidoc. Think it was lack of easy toolchain in python ecosystem that made me move away from it.

Maybe asciidoc3 har improved the situation.

Never needed bold italics. :)

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