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Comment by WolfOliver | Hacker News Reader

The only time Markdown works for me is if I have simple text with some bold sections. Only adding a link brings me out of the flow already.

Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one?

[text](http://url) [http://url](text) (http://url)[text] (text)[http://url]

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> Is there a mnemonic to remember which one is the right one?

"square the circle"

The Markdown link format is [text](url) and [] is square-ish and () is circle-ish.

Your mileage may vary (as with any mnemonic), but this one works for me.

I memorized it by thinking about it like a function call — so () comes last

I'm always having to look up the link format for reddit, and I always seem to get it backwards one-way-or-another first try. That's where markdown breaks down, at least for my uses. When you get beyond headings, lists, bold and italics, the complexity increases sharply.

Whereas HTML is reasonably consistent and simple in it's syntax, which grows from basics to complex structures.

<b>this is bold</b> is really not much different <a href="">This is a link</a> and the heirarchy of <table> <tr> <td>.

My mnemonic is that the parentheses are a following sidenote that can always be skipped by the reader in normal writing. The hyperlink to follow for more information is the parenthetical.

Then the brackets are literally bracketing the text that should be styled as a hyperlink.

Weirdly enough, I remembered it as “the parts are in the order I'd intuitively expect, but the brackets are not”.

Muscle memory? Do you have trouble remembering how anchor tags work in html?

You're appealing to the law of averages here; all things aren't necessarily equally easy to remember. There's no arbitrary order that has to be remembered with an anchor tag: all tags start with an angle bracket, what they are (if we include the "/" in the name), and a list of attributes, and are closed with another angle bracket. If some elements were opened with square brackets and closed with angle brackets, it would be harder to remember. It would be worse if there were also others that opened with angle brackets and closed with square brackets.

It will always be easier to remember a 10-letter name than a 10-digit number.

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