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Comment by keerthiko | Hacker News Reader

I hope you are aware that nearly every markdown renderer respects full HTML right? As soon as you open a HTML tag, you can just treat its insides as HTML. That way you can just write prose when you are in content mode. If you want to switch to dev/designer mode you simply have to open a HTML tag.

When you can simply think of markdown as a syntax tooling on HTML that is widely human readable (by non-web developers!) without stopping you from having the full power of HTML whenever and however you like it, how is that not a win?

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> As soon as you open a HTML tag, you can just treat its insides as HTML.

That is not entirely true. There are some edge cases to consider and while considering edge cases, we first need to decide which Markdown flavour we want to use. Some of us also need to consider if we are willing to commit to that Markdown flavour for the next 10, 20, 30 years or so because we do not want to "fix" our content again when some content rendering breaks due to edge cases when we switch from one Markdown renderer to another. The multiple flavours of Markdown handle several edge cases in different ways.

Let us pick CommonMark as the Markdown flavour for this comment. Here is an interesting edge case that is relevant to your comment. Consider the following Markdown input:

  <div>
  *foo*
  </div>

The above Markdown input is rendered as the following HTML output:

  <div>
  *foo*
  </div>

Now consider the following Markdown input:

  <div>

  *foo*

  </div>

This is rendered as the following HTML output:

  <div>
  <p><em>foo</em></p>
  </div>

One can use https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/ to test these examples.

So as soon as we open an HTML tag, we can't just treat everything inside it as plain HTML. The content within the HTML tags may get interpreted as Markdown as shown in the second example above. Now granted, all of this is clearly specified in the CommonMark specification and these edge cases are handled in this manner for good reasons (such as providing a way to use Markdown syntax within HTML tags, in the above example). But one has to understand the specification very well and keep these edge cases in mind while mixing HTML and Markdown.

For many people, these edge cases are not a problem because they write simple Markdown that would probably get rendered the way they expect, without any surprises. I can understand why many people prefer to use Markdown to write their website content. But there are also some of us, who find this extra complexity to be not worth it, especially because editing plain HTML files is nearly as easy, if not more, with a good editor (Emacs, in my case).

> I hope you are aware that nearly every markdown renderer respects full HTML right?

Yeah, I'm aware.

> That way you can just write prose when you are in content mode. If you want to switch to dev/designer mode you simply have to open a HTML tag.

When I want to just write prose, I can use a WYSIWYG word processor. When I want to make a post on my web page, I can write it in HTML. I rarely benefit from having a third option... markdown, the "mediocre at all things" format, which is not good enough to replace a word processor from the 1990s and not good enough to use in place of HTML when I'm making my web page.

I do actually use markdown... for small snippets of notes. I have all my Emacs setup to edit markdown quite nicely. If the notes start getting too large and detailed, I copy and paste the notes to a word processor, so I don't have to deal with markdown's awful syntax. If the notes evolve into a blog post, I'll rewrite them in HTML--I always rewrite notes anyway, before posting. It's much more common that I start blog posts in a word processor, rather than markdown, though.

> When you can simply think of markdown as a syntax tooling on HTML that is widely human readable (by non-web developers!) without stopping you from having the full power of HTML whenever and however you like it, how is that not a win?

This argument is taking for granted the idea that people like markdown syntax, when I thought that I had been pretty clear that I don't like markdown syntax. I think it's just kinda mediocre at lots of different things, and in the end, is worse than just using plain HTML... except for a few niches, like READMEs on GitHub and comments on Reddit.

To be clear, markdown is not a win for using in my website because it makes my tooling more complicated, and it delivers no benefits.

I can understand why some people like it... surely you can try to understand that some people don't, and we don't just dislike markdown for no reason.

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