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Comment by graypegg | Hacker News Reader

HTML is already a markup language. You could just as easily make basic websites using HTML and some basic inline CSS.

(They’d even have some extra features missing from Markdown that I’d consider still part of a basic content formatting suite like floating or multi-column layouts. They’d even have a defined standard for machine readable metadata!)

The problem is that people don’t make websites like that very often, even though they can. This is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t currently exist.

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HTML is a subset of Markdown.

You can include in Markdown any and all HTML.

What Markdown provides here is an even lower barrier to entry for the majority of people... they just write text, learn a fraction more Markdown to so more... and if they want total control they eventually learn HTML too.

It's not mutually exclusive... Markdown includes HTML.

Markup is not the barrier to entry. Nobody in 2022 is building HTML-only websites. Even 20 years ago CMSes let hundreds of thousands of people write blogs online.

Let's say somebody takes the time to learn Markdown. Then what?

Are they going to then also learn how to select a web host, how to set up SSL, how to use CSS to make the website look the way they want?

They won't. That's why Wordpress, and later Facebook, won the online publishing wars.

—I’d say it’s the other way around isn’t it? Wouldn’t Markdown be a subset of HTML, since all markdown can be expressed in HTML but not all HTML can be expressed in Markdown?—

Edit: Markdown can contain HTML that gets meaningfully interpreted as markup as well.

I’d also say HTML is not difficult to write, even for someone new to the concept. I don’t think anyone making their GeoCities homepage was too strained learning HTML, and those were leagues more advanced than what’s possible with only Markdown!

If you want people to be excited about self-publishing online again, it’s probably best to start with the markup language that allows for some fun :)

As far as I’m aware, you can write any HTML in Markdown, and it will be rendered normally. So Markdown can indeed contain any and all HTML.

HTML can’t contain Markdown at all - a ### in HTML does nothing but a <strong>hello</strong> in Markdown does exactly what you expect it to.

So you can't create a simple markdown rendered without creating a full-blown html/css renderer. So a cli renderer doesn't make sense either in that case.

Html 'support' is just a hack for any shortcomings of markdown.

If you think about it in terms of syntax, then sure. Markdown is a superset of HTML. I think it's much more meaningful to compare their semantics instead. From that point of view, Markdown is a nicer, more human-readable syntax for a very small subset of html, plus an escape hatch to reach the rest of HTML using conventional syntax.

> As far as I’m aware, you can write any HTML in Markdown, and it will be rendered normally.

It depends on your parser. Commonmark, for example, has rules for entering html mode: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#html-blocks

Neither is truly a superset of the other.

To be fair, you can include Markdown inside script tags (assign a custom type like "text/markdown") and render this (the script's innerHTML) by another script.

A ### in Markdown doesn't "do" anything either, the reader just has to know that it denotes a 3rd level heading.

Oh I see, my mistake. Thanks!

If say 10% of the pool of internet users at the time could make an HTML page on Geocities, what % of today’s pool of internet users could do it? The pool has gotten much larger and much less tech savvy on average.

Well I guess the next logical question is what % would not make an HTML page, but would make a Markdown page.

I feel like the Venn diagram is nearly a circle, but I don’t have anything to back that up.

To most people, symbols and words being “special” in some text = coding, I’m still not convinced that the cognitive load of:

# my title

Is different than

<h1>my title</h1>

Its true. As another commenter said the baseline now is writing content into a social network and let it do all the work or use a GUI

Then again, personal content is no longer shared via personal homepage but via Facebook/YouTube/TikTok/Medium/etc these days.

Markdown allows you to just write HTML in it. That makes it a superset of HTML.

HTML is not difficult to write, it's difficult to edit.

A S-expression-based dialect of HTML (with macros!) would be fun.

You’ve got it backwards. Markdown is a superset of HTML.

Markdown specific syntax is not valid in HTML pages, but all HTML is valid in Markdown.

> HTML is a subset of Markdown.

Yes, so all websites are already written in markdown. Its just tjat No browsers support the typical header/list shorthands, but that doesn’t matter because even if they did you’d still need more tages to get interactivity and styling working.

People aren’t imagining a world where markdown makes anything simpler they are imagino by that a format change would make people build less complex websites. But why would they? It’s not HTML that makes the Twitter front end or Facebook complicated, it’s the desisted functionality, which wouldn’t change even if the spice code looked more like markdown and less like html.

So are Markdown rendering libraries entirely pointless? I'm not sure where you'd get the impression that HTML is a subset of HTML rather than Markdown being a superset of HTML. (even that is very reductive, though)

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