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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

I've also stuck with plain HTML for my personal website, and stayed away from stuff like Markdown. It feels like too often, with Markdown, I'd be figuring out questions like "how do I get Markdown to emit the HTML that I want?"

It's not like Markdown saves me that much typing over HTML in the first place, and the HTML is a lot easier to think about.

And yes... Emacs is my HTML editor of choice, too.

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I don't really get the saving or convenience of Markdown, esp., if you are already used to typing HTM. (HTML for simple things is easy and short enough, and fancy things are beyond Markdown anyways.)

Here's my stack:

Hosted webspace (yes, like it's the 1990s!) Apache/Unix, simple PHP templates for headers and footers, basic navigation, etc w/o JS, for the blog a custom (server-side) script generating virtual article locations, navigation, meta data, basic chrome, and a RRS feed from a simple data-file and reading static HTML for the content from static files. BBEdit for editing. No analytics. (The webspace comes with Webalizer, but this stopped working some 10 years ago. I don't care.)

And yes, there are special pages with full-fledged JS apps, as well, or blog posts featuring complex things, so nothing is chiseled in stone. If there's a purpose to it. However, a visitor should be able to get an idea what a page is about without JS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30142327

I use it because I'm just too tempted to play with extra formatting with html+css, that's probably the only reason. Also my main notes app (Obsidian) is markdown.

Very much in the spirit of Jeff Huang: https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/

I have to admit that I like the 'bare' feeling of Markdown...it just looks a little bit 'cleaner' to me (quotes here because that is super subjective).

You should be able to write HTML into any Markdown document therefore having the best of both worlds

To be perfectly honest, that sounds terrible. Like, just completely awful. I definitely don't want to do that.

HTML by itself is easy enough to work with. The syntax for HTML is pretty basic. A little verbose sometimes, but since the late 1990s it has not been hard to find a text editor that will do things like autoindent and insert closing tags automatically.

Markdown introduces a ton of weird syntax to save you a little bit of typing. That's a good tradeoff when you are striving to keep people engaged with your site... that's the reason why Markdown is used on places like Stack Overflow, Reddit, a bunch of blogs, etc. Asking people to learn how to use BBCode is a kinda tall order compared to Markdown.

However, the cost-benefit of Markdown is completely different on a my personal blog. I'm using somewhat more complicated stuff on my blog... a few standard elements like boxes that say "note", a couple charts here and there with D3, occasionally something interactive, maybe some math with KaTeX. It's not super-complicated stuff, but it's stuff that's often no fun to try and write in Markdown. Even <table> is nicer in HTML than Markdown.

I would rather deal with one simple syntax (HTML) rather than a weird mix of two syntaxes (HTML + Markdown) where one of them (Markdown) has bunch of weird edge cases. As far as I can tell, the main benefit of Markdown for personal blogs is that it's slightly less typing. Not exactly a killer feature in my eyes. (It's also very frustrating when trying to write technical documentation.)

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