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Comment by jimmytucson | Hacker News Reader

    > allows structure to grow organically
    > powerful feature ... Internal Links.
    > plain text files

Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup. So that invites the question - why not HyperText Markup Language?

Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof? It's been around long enough. And doesn't it also work offline? There's a bunch of different apps out there that support viewing these both on and offline.

So, do people just use Obsidian/Markdown because they like dislike "<em>HTML</em>"?

edit: I'm not saying it's "wrong" to dislike HTML. I'm 50% trolling and 50% saying none of these are features of Obsidian. They're features of HTML (and Markdown is its shorthand).

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Markdown is so much easier to read and maintain in its raw form. I can't imagine trying to take meeting notes in html.

``` - [ ] Item 1 - [ ] Item 2 ```

``` <ul> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 1</label></li> <li><checkbox> <label>Item 2</label></li> </ul> ```

The main point of Markdown is that it's easy to write and read without any extra rendering processes.

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#philosop...

Here is a nice article of many light weight markup languages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language

I like Markdown a lot, though I prefer org-mode due to the extra features it comes with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Org-mode

they like it because

# title

this is the paragraph

is more natural to write than:

<html> <head>...<head/> <body> <h1> title </h1> <p>this is the paragraph</p> </body> </html>

when you're just jotting some thoughts down.

So the answer to my original question is - yes :)

Eh, the em example is reductive and makes it seem like markdown doesn't have much advantage.

If you rewrite your comment with lists I think your question becomes self-explanatory.

But you don't need the head and body stuff. This renders perfectly fine in a web browser on my local machine:

    <h1>My Title</h1>
    <p>This is a paragraph.</p>

For sure, you need an end tag, and Markdown doesn't. But for simple note taking, are you really writing deeply nested HTML?

The main benefit is that markdown is really readable _without_ rendering. You don't need to edit and then open in a browser.

You can comfortably read plaintext that has a little structure, while HTML adds some ceremony that makes it a bit harder to glance at the material as the tags are much more in your face.

Totally agree

You’re getting smashed for no particularly good reason in my opinion.

I am in the camp if I like the idea of Obsidian but I have a bunch of other stuff I want to include and do stuff with like JSON-LD data for example.

But the idea of writing raw HTML is in fact a huge pain in the ass as everyone was all too eager to point out here.

We have had markdown to HTML converters and visual editing experiences for a long time now and I don’t know why the argument has to be “write in raw HTML” I barely even want to write Markdown when taking notes, I just want to write.

So in that spirit I think HTML and and in browser experience is in fact the right answer I just need to put an editor on top of it and a way to run code when I hit publish to update the graph visualisations and statistics that people seem to really like with Obsidian.

I actually think this might be a really good usecase for the built in IndexedDB API built into browsers so long as you can also back it up and sync across devices.

Yeah, clearly I touched a nerve :)

But I still don't know what Obsidian gives you besides letting you write in Markdown instead of HTML. And that is basically a Markdown to HTML converter, as you pointed out.

It's hard to overstate the flowstate Obsidian enables with live / wysiwyg editor view -- enjoy the clean look of rendered HTML while typing simple markdown and kbd shortcuts -- "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". There are many other reasons I love Obsidian, but most of all it's the core function -- the editor interface, atop my local, private markdown files.

Yes but this is the exact point.

We could have that exact same workflow and user interface with HTML.

I (presumably along with the person you’re replying to) don’t understand what value Markdown as the storage format is providing here exactly but I can think of many limitations it imposes.

simpler, lighter, less verbose, more portable, much more readable "in the raw",....

Right, but the scenario we are describing explicitly makes the “in the raw” part not particularly relevant.

I’m not against markdown as an idea of file format, I’m just saying that it has some pretty clear limitations that I think are very much within the scope of what I want out of a tool like that and that weird MDX format they have as a substitute is a step backwards in my opinion.

You are dismissing what people are telling you. Several have pointed out that Markdown is easier to read and write when taking notes. For example, lists where each item has an additional ~14 keystrokes per item, links which have an additional ~20 keystrokes.

Your answer was that that doesn't matter. If that's your view, you are welcome to it, but that's why /other/ people choose Markdown over HTML for notes.

Not dismissing it at all. My original comment asks that very question. I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.

I don't understand where all the feelings are coming from. :)

Because you're not actually caring to listen to what people are saying.

People do not find writing SGML-based formats ergonomic for focusing on the content of their writing. SGML-based formats are great for formats that need to be both human-readable, but also unambiguous and extensible for machine parsing, but awful when the task is purely just producing writing.

If I need HTML from my writings in Markdown, there are a plethora of tools to handle that; I don't need to waste vital brain bandwidth on writing perfect spec-complaint HTML when Markdown handles only the task of writing structured text and does it well.

Markdown does not handle layout, and barely handles tables. It is the technological equivalent of HTML 1.0, and does not contaminate itself with the task of presentation like how the evolution of HTML over the years has.

You just dismissed what I said. One primary draw of Obsidian is the ability to write in Markdown.

> I was just wondering if there's anything else that Obsidian offers besides Markdown syntax, since hyperlinking documents and application-agnostic data formats are also features of HTML.

Yet you reply asking if there is anything beyond Markdown. That's dismissing what a lot of people have reiterated: Markdown is the main thing.

You keep looking for a different killer feature because you are dismissing everyone else's killer feature.

I disagree that markdown is a shorthand for HTML. It's a plain text doc with standardized ASCII stylistic features, that is basically exactly the way you would want to write a plain text document most of the time. It's not really markup. It's markdown.

I agree the noted features aren't really special to obsidian, but they might feel special when you consider markdown first and foremost as a plaintext format, and only second as a style convention

Do you write your documentation and notes using HTML? Serious question because if not not, why even ask the question? Why does this invite the question? One can easily see that markdown requires less characters and is a quicker flow for jotting down notes. You can open up a markdown file in any file viewer and easily read it without any view processing...not the same for HTML. Silly question.

HTML is (1) a lot more painful and verbose to write and (2) impossible to decipher in source mode. Markdown fixes both these problems.

> Well, they're not _plain_ text - there is some markup.

Markup is still plaintext.

> why not HyperText Markup Language?

Why not json or yaml? If you remove the users ability to write the text directly, then why limit yourself to the unstructured mess that HTML is?

> Doesn't HTML have all of these features - hyperlinks, folder structures, "plain" text? Isn't HTML also future proof?

Markdown is human-friendly. There is a whole ecology around using it for those usecases. And you can create HTML from markdown anyway.

HTML was not really meant to be generated by humans. Just like XML, it's supposed to be machine readable first and foremost.

This has to be factually wrong, no? The first web servers just served documents from a directory called `htdocs`.

Well, markdown is a lot easier to read "unrendered". It's a lot more accessible to non-technical people as well, since with html sometimes you need to put the content between two matching tags (h1), sometimes it needs to go between a tag and inside a tag (a), and sometimes there isn't even a matching tag! (img)

Pretty much. You want to optimize for fluidity in writing, and angle brackets just get in the way too much.

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