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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

I've said it so many times my throat is sore but here goes again...

As with literally everything, it depends. Markdown is lovely for tech documentation, notes and journaling. It's simple and beautiful and mostly independent of layout.

Want to author something rich and expressive which has a modern web audience in front of it (either end user or editor) and it's probably not the right tool.

I work with large numbers of - let me call them "creative editors and authors". They want to embed video, pullquotes, tables, interactives. They want to float images, include audio and much more.

Markdown is not for them. Something block based and visual, namely Gutenberg or similar - is.

As ever (voice grows increasingly hoarse...) it's dependent on needs.

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I see this drive often: find the one true universal format, that can both provide documentation, while also providing an interactive 3D experience for a racing game, equipped with an internal web browser that also lets you listen to the radio

I think we just have to be okay with having to learn multiple formats in our lifetime; I don't see a way around it

> Markdown is lovely for tech documentation

That’s one of the weakest points of Markdown, because it has no support for any sort of cross-referencing so they have to be maintained by hand or through bespoke extension (often conflicting).

MySt and sphinx are getting attentions these days. As a ascii doc lurker, and fed up of rst, I'm very hopeful.

Sphinx & rst combo is great in theory. in practice, it has a big learning curve and the python tooling is not the fastest option. I had tried it once in my previous job, and people do not want to learn it, or spend time with doc related stuff

That makes me appreciate markdown a lot, As it is easier to pick up. And has fantastic tooling. And there is at least one md to html project, which will be in your language of choice

Yeah rST is theoretically nice but being both permissive and extremely whitespace-sensitive makes it very fiddly in practice, with inscrutable warnings and many mis-compiled documents with no warnings or information.

Some of the markup choices were really less than ideal in retrospect, especially indentation for quoting and definition lists (though it’s nice to have definition lists), even more so given the aforementioned whitespace sensitivity.

Really hard to beat as a thing to build around, but that also greatly limits the ability to process or reimplement it.

Hence MyST.

Yes, and:

For personal notes, I find Gemtext even better than Markdown, because it's even simpler.

=> https://web.archive.org/web/20220124235538/https://gemini.ci... Gemtext

I spend less time trying to remember syntax or decide on which syntax option to use, because there is so little syntax. It feels like writing plain text with just a handful of conventions.

I have never understood why Markdown has gotten so much attention over the last decade while ReStructured Text - which is a similar format but actually standardized and more developed than Markdown - gets so little.

Tools like DocUtils and Sphinx allow one to do quite a lot with ReStructured Text, and I believe Pandoc can convert it to Markdown without any issues.

If you aren't familiar with it, a good hard look at ReStructured Text may be worth your time.

I have never used rest, took a look and feel that manual underlines for sections are very clunky. And tables, one of the parts that I think markdown isn’t doing well, rest isn’t really better

Maybe it has something to do with emergence and domination of plateforms like github? Just wondering…

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