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Comment by greggsy | Hacker News Reader

Markdown isn’t immune to deprecation in the Obsidian ecosystem - I have files with random junk in the headers leftover from failed attempts to integrate some data management plugin or regime.

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Its called front matter and its supported in markdown

How does that change the point being made? Front matter is supported essentially as a bucket of metadata. Front matter has varying degrees of usefulness without supporting tooling.

Front matter is still a simple text based format that can easily be parsed by other programs, and there is already quite a bit of tooling to process it. Even without tooling, it’s human readable. The degree of usefulness just increases the more sophisticated the tool is that you’re using to read it. Compare this with the painful migration away from Evernote, which left me with a folder full of giant .enex files that I can technically use elsewhere, but at this point are realistically just an archive I’ll never touch unless I really need something.

So? Does it matter much for some reason? That doesn’t seem like a compatibility issue.

If you've invested time into adding metadata and app-specific markdown to your setup, you lose that when you move to another tool. Has happened to me before. It's about vendor lock-in when you go too deep into their ecosystem.

And instead of open text files with plaintext properties in the YAML frontmatter standard, you want to do.... what, exactly?

And the plugins are all OSS, on GitHub.

What do you imagine is more open with less lock-in?

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