Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

"Markdown isn't an alternative."

Strongest possible respectful disagreement.

--- ^ orig comment above, edits below (I was interrupted when 1st commenting; apologies to anyone who responded to the short version) ---

See eg Obsidian (https://obsidian.md) for a great example. It's astonishing how feature-rich it's become. WYSIWYG editor, Excalidraw integration, Slid.es, etc etc etc.

And if you have any webdev chops at all, you have access to HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It's not even close.

View on HN

Markdown is actually awful. There's at least 3 different dialects that are all called Markdown, so if you want your text rendered it's a toss-up as to whether or not it'll look how you intend.

I think that Markdown's success is due to a lack of a widely-used, simple alternative that's well-specified.

Org is easily and objectively the best markup but of course it's only very very recently that there was a non-emacs implement worth a damn.

Then pick a standardized dialect. Commonmark is the lowest common denominator; GFM is useful for when you need some extra features. Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need something fancy.

The advantage of markdown isn't robustness, it's simplicity. Preteens can get a handle on it in minutes when using Reddit.

The main benefit that all these markup-shorthands serve IMO is getting people to add meaning semantically rather than with presentation. Word processor users typically adjust font size and color to make headings, even when given a list of headings right in the ribbon. Markdown is just an HTML shorthand: you can only work with semantic meaning.

>Markdown also allows HTML for whenever you need something fancy.

Indeed and therein lies what I view is Markdown's worst feature.

While I broadly agree, particularly because it feels so fuzzy about when it starts interpreting it as raw HTML and when it goes back to markdown... I'm not sure how you can really claim Org is unambiguously better (best!) when Org mode has multiple flavors of almost exactly the same kind of feature. E.g. inline HTML in Org is: https://orgmode.org/manual/Quoting-HTML-tags.html#Quoting-HT...

    @@html:<b>@@bold text@@html:</b>@@

Or inline LaTeX, which is arguably much worse than markdown's HTML fuzziness: https://orgmode.org/manual/LaTeX-fragments.html#LaTeX-fragme...

>To avoid conflicts with currency specifications, single ‘$’ characters are only recognized as math delimiters if the enclosed text contains at most two line breaks, is directly attached to the ‘$’ characters with no whitespace in between, and if the closing ‘$’ is followed by whitespace, punctuation or a dash.

If I understand that correctly, it means this is LaTeX:

    $a^2
    +1
    =b$

But this is not:

    $a^2
    +1
    +2
    =b$

Similarly, this is apparently an inline chunk of LaTeX: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/39527/which-count...

    USA tends to use $123 to show dollar amounts,
    but e.g. Germany apparently sometimes uses 123$.

I get that Markdown is expected to be rendered into HTML eventually, but I find the syntax useful in its raw form too, just for formatting text files.

>Org is easily and objectively the best markup

I laughed.

Most of these differences are managed rather easy.

> Sometimes I need more flexible layout of fonts and graphics

That’s the key. For much of my writing, all I need is text with a little formatting, and markdown is great for that as a user. (It’s less nice if you’re writing a parser, but that hasn’t come up for me yet :) )

For some of my writing I need professional-grade layout. There I either use LaTeX directly, or I use pandoc then LaTeX.

But sometimes I need to:

- Include images that don’t have a public URL

- Use more than one font

- Have a recipient be able to edit the document

- And the recipient isn’t a developer

Markdown doesn’t check all of those boxes. Word files do (as do Google Docs links, ODF files, and some others).

Markdown is great, but it’s not enough all of the time.

Asking people to become web devs to get the kind of formatting Word makes trivial is not a winning argument.

Agreed. It's also not the argument I was making.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com