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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc.

Another red flag to me is supporting GitHub-flavored Markdown over CommonMark which actually tries to follow good standards practice for everyone. Instead projects like Pandoc have to work hard on alternative parsers because GitHub does whatever it wants with little regard for CommonMark's RFC, and in some cases, even basic semantic HMTL.

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If you are adding a lot of html into prose, then I'm not sure you really want a microblog. The limitations of markdown are a feature here.

There is no mention of “microblog” on the page. If you’re implying “a blog platform for hackers” means ‘hackers’ don’t need proper tools for providing a semantic blogging, then ‘hackers’ need to get better at communication because these sorts of features matter for accessibility and experience.

I think the 'hacker' aesthetic and mentality enforces limitations to keep things standard and quickly pareseable. Think man pages for people. Yet, the full power of html is there if you want it and don't mind doing the extra legwork. But such things are discouraged in favor of regularity and ease of production.

This is precisely what I expected when I first visited OP/TFA.

Then at that point, you might as well use Gemini or not render the document to HTML. I would expect to see more use of ASCII art and box model drawing from the Unicode blocks. The thing is this “hacker aesthetic” via Markdown from the GitHub RENDERME.md—because you can rarely read the plaintext anymore—is now percolating the use of the unsemantic elements to the general internet. I’m seeing misuse of blockquotes in the wild. I’m seeing manual table of content management in Markdown. The list continues. Because the context is HTML, one should probably try to follow the spec because this matters to screen readers and alternate browsers like the TUI as well as just general parsability for upstream and downstream tools.

this is a silly thing to over analyze. it's OK it you have a different definition /understanding. But I guess infinite pedantry is also part of the hacker aesthetic.

It doesn't need to be spelled out that it's a microblogging platform, it just needs to mention that one of the features is that you write your posts in markdown, and I guess the average person would reason that it's a blogging platform with limited functionally as a feature, aka microblog.

> Markdown is severely limiting for prose and blogging though and leads to unsemantic element abuse or having to do a lot of manual HTML markup (which with no controls over styles means you’re limited further). There aren’t good conventions for a lot of ‘normal’ concepts like admonitions, figures, definition lists, citing blockquotes, footnotes, table of contents, etc.

Really excellent point. Instead of markdown, what would you suggest?

AsciiDoc or reStructuredText. Maybe Org Mode, but I don’t know as much about it.

Github's flavour is based on Commonmark, with just some extensions on top FYI.

"GFM is a strict superset of CommonMark.", https://github.github.com/gfm/#introduction, third paragraph.

You say that, but look what they are doing with admonitions right now (https://github.com/orgs/github-community/discussions/16925). Despite the RFC (https://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...) which is used in a lot of implementations, GitHub decided to do their own thing with an unsemantic, buggy implementation by overloading blockquotes (meanwhile still not supporting admonition styling in reStructuredText or AsciiDoc despite their specs having the feature for years).

That's impossible since there is no invalid markdown/CommonMark in the first place so to add anything you need to change the meaning of something.

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