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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Too annoying to write by hand. also too annoying to read the raw text. Markdown is easy to write by hand and looks good enough without a viewer.

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This is an eminently solvable problem. I've been writing my personal website in a variation of HTML for a while now which is perfectly easy to write and read.

  {main
   {h1 Title}
   {p
    Paragraph 1.
    {{a {href google.com}} Here is a link.}}
   {p
    Paragraph 2, now with {b bold} text.}}

The nice thing about HTML/XML is that it's a clear data-structure, so you can essentially read it in any format you like and convert that to the underlying tree structure without much issue. That's why it's been so successful, basically the same philosophy as a lisp. Why someone would look at that and think "let's go back to a document with no clear structure" is beyond me.

You solved it with s expressions.

Replace the braces with parens and you can parse that into a tree with only a handful of lisp macros.

The braces are quite deliberate. Firstly, parens are used often in writing and it would be a pain to have to escape them. Secondly, it integrates much easier with the Scheme code of my site generator this way. I can write in a file, something like:

  (define (code-block file-name)
    {pre {{code {class block}}
          #(cmd "highlight" (thisdir (string-append "posts/" file-name))
                "-O" "html" "--inline-css" "--fragment"
                "--line-numbers" "--line-number-length" "3")}})

And it fits quite nicely with surrounding code. The mapping of these curly expressions to Scheme ones is relatively simple, though there is a special case for joining words to brackets.

  {a {b} #c #@d} => `("a" ("b") ,c ,@d)
  {a {b}c} => `("a" ("b") join "c")

Sure, I didn't mean to imply that you didn't know what you were doing. I was just adding more context for those readers who don't know what an s-expression is.

FWIW, my first static blogging system (circa 2003) did almost exactly the same thing you are doing (except that I used `[]` for lists, not `{}`). IIRC, it was maybe 5-6 macros+functions (and some readtable magic) to turn every `[foo ...]` into `<foo> ... </foo>`, with support for attributes using `:name=value` syntax and a list of exceptions for non-closing tags such as `<br>`, etc.

I redid something like that recently, in C, and it turned out to be unreasonably larger to write than in Clisp.

TBH, these days it's better to simply stick to markdown, because the tooling is much better (previews as you type, tools to automatically generate the html, inline HTML for what markdown won't do, etc).

Apart from the p tag, that gets annoying when you have long stretches of prose, I find plain html5 much less annoying than markdown. Moreover, tables and hyperlinks are clearer and easier to type in html5 than in any markdown flavor.

Easier to type? Sure, but I don't think HTML5 tables are easier to read than markdown tables

Thanks to optional closing tags, html5 tables are quite neat:

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>first row, first column
      <td>first row, second column
      <td>first row, third column
    <tr>
      <td>second row, first column
      <td>second row, second column
      <td>second row, third column
  </table>

Does it get any better in markdown?

The fact that you need to list columns in rows already makes it NOT a table

Both are diffult to read and work with.

both are difficult to work with since it's not the job of a data format, but table editing tooling on top of that, but the markdown tables that look like tables aren't difficult to read unlike HTML

I'll convert your example to GFM.

  | first row, first column  | first row, second column  | first row, third column  |
  | ------------------------ | ------------------------- | ------------------------ |
  | second row, first column | second row, second column | second row, third column |

To me, this is more readable than the HTML version.

It's not fun to manually reformat those tables for readability. If I add something to the `second row, second column`, I have to add extra spaces to the `first row, second column`, or it will look janky.

  | first row, first column  | first row, second column  | first row, third column  |
  | ------------------------ | ------------------------- | ------------------------ |
  | second row, first column | exceptionally long second row, that makes second column look worse | second row, third column |

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