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Comment by majkinetor | Hacker News Reader

Markdown is way better IMO, also very simple yet allowing for better visuals and more expressivness, and new protocol should be designed to use it as its text format.

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Gemtext is weird, it’s hyper-focused on a very specific form of text publishing. It’s not trying to be “old internet” featuring the creative freedom of its users, it’s just text content and that’s it. Not even inline links or images! Which I personally think makes it a bad format for the old-internet mainstay of “website about one specific interest of mine”.

I run a little capsule but I find myself with not much to do because I’m really not interested in writing long blog posts. I made a crappy HN reader over gem, it’s not very usable predictably haha

I still think HTML is the ideal creative-indy-internet format.

Gemtext seems to be more like wanting to be an online typewriter. Back when typewriters were used to write documents, there was one typeface and font, and no hyperlinks or images. To reference other documents you could use footnotes or a bibliography. Margins and line spacing (except maybe for block-quotes) were fixed. A lot of useful information was communicated in this format, but it does seem a bit too austere today.

That’s a good analogy, that does seem to be the guiding aesthetic they’re going for.

It’s austere but I can see why people like it if they’re really into writing as this raw “doesn’t need anything else” medium. I like my silly little pictures and syntax highlighted code samples though.

The weird thing is you can write like that in HTML if you want to.

    <html>
      Lots of plain text
    </html>

Will render just fine. I don't think any browsers really even require those opening and closing tags.

You'll need to do a little bit more if you want paragraphs in your text, because otherwise HTML will just smush them together.

It will not. You'll lose line breaks.

Yes that's true, I'll amend my comment to say that there's nothing about HTML that prevents you from writing in this austere styling if that's all you want to do. Quickly scanning the gemtext intro, it looks like you have headings (three levels), links (but not inline), lists, blockquotes, and preformatted text. That's it. So with these tags you're there:

  <h1> <h2> <h3>
  <p>
  <ul> and <li>
  <a>
  <blockquote>
  <pre>

Granted gemtext markup is slightly more terse, but it would hardly matter in practice.

The problem with markdown, as I understand it, is that it's not possible to correctly render without reading the entire document.

I think the gemini format is attempting to make it possible to basically render the document line by line.

Oh that’s a good point! I guess things like bold markers reaching over multiple lines does complicate parsing somewhat if you had to find the paired delimitators. But considering that Gemtext considers the pre formatted text block that starts and ends with backticks to be a “mode switch” I don’t see why you couldn’t consider spec-ing a sort of state-machine markdown. (Maybe that’s already the current understanding of it!)

If you leave off the ending * then everything till the last line will be bold, for example.

That’s gemtext though. Mandatory TLS on the gem protocol makes most of this moot IMO. It’s 10x harder to view a gemtext document in a gemini browser. What simplicity did we gain with markdown--?

If only HTTP could serve text/plain documents. If only!

No, Markdown is a format for authoring HTML. It makes a very bad interchange format because the it leaves too much ambiguity in parsing. Also, parsing speed of Markdown is much slower than the parsing speed of a strictly conforming XML file.

That is all easily solvable.

Parsing speed, really? In this age?

It has its problems but its easy, widely adopted, with hundreds of tools, and simply way more capable than gemtext (which is simply very bad).

I have a blog focussed on small entries (tweet length) consisting of Markdown in a fortune file format, that renders +10k items in about 5 seconds. Using Perl.

Parsing Markdown is fast enough.

Your 10k items are probably only 2MB. Spending 5s to parse a 2MB text file is very slow, even for Perl. If you are distributing your file to users, that's 5s for each one of them. If you convert it to html and distribute the html file, your user will spend 1s in parsing, tops. This is exactly why I said Markdown makes a very bad interchange format.

Nah, it's 10K items spread over 45 files, 7.5M in total, and the blog engine generates monthly pages etc. Note that I've not bothered with any optimization, I re-render all content after adding one new item.

But I agree MD isn't a good interchange format.

Markdown is, uh, not so good, it just won a popularity cintest. E.g. Creole is much better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_(markup)

Why is Creole better?

To me they look much the same.

Except I prefer Markdown for the looks and how widespread it is.

I was a Wikipedia contributor for many years before Markdown came along, and I think Markdown has a better flavor for hyperlinks. "[link text](url)", "[link text][footnote] + [footnote]: url" are just great. I write like this even without any expectation of rendering it as anything but plaintext.

Years ago I read a well-reasoned comparison of a handful of markup languages and the author made a strong case for Creole (which I had never heard of before or since. I use markdown just like everybody else. ;)

Unfortunately, I can't remember the arguments and I've never been able to find that article again.

So I can't tell you why it's better. But try it and see what you think?

I already evaluated Creole and prefer Markdown. I also prefer reStructured Text over Creole.

Searching for comparative reviews, I’ve found five, neither of which recommended Creole for any particular reason.

My main point of review is how to make local links:

When I use Markdown, it’s either in my Obsidian notes which actually have a wiki-style [[link]] syntax (not standard for Markdown), or it’s in a git repository where local links means a link to a relative file path.

The latter is more portable, whereas wiki-style namespaces assume one homogenous knowledge base, which makes distributing documents more difficult.

Oh I like it. It looks unambiguous, and it feels just as mnemonic as Markdown. I can't believe I haven't seen it before..

We will never have good things. Just good enough. As it has enormous traction, and you can explain it to anybody in 5 minutes, it is good enough.

This is the first time I've heard of Creole (I've been authoring in Markdown since 2004).

Doesn't look like better in anything ?

No markup syntax is straight up worse

Markdown is pretty bad for a lot of use-cases, like embedding data into text or using data to format text.

I took my own stab at similar constraints: https://github.com/civboot/cxt

I like the checkbox-support. Other than that it looks like a harder-to-write and harder-to-remember version of html.

But as long as it scratches your itch and you're productive in it, that's what counts.

Hmm, "harder to write" stings, considering how difficult html is to write. Thanks for the feedback!

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