Hacker News Reader

Comment by meribold | Hacker News Reader

Wasn't reStructuredText the one where you can't make text a link if any of it is bold/italic/monospaced? IIRC, nesting of inline markup is generally not possible. It works in Markdown…

View on HN

I had to scroll way too far to find this. All the arguments for RST are about how much more expressive the language is, how much care was taken in making it an abstract document tree. Yet there are simple trees you can't encode, even common ones that markdown handles fine.

I'm not using a language simply because it was aiming at something better, if it missed the mark.

Right, this is the one fairly clear down-side of RST, in practice I've found it's never been an issue - but it does seem like a strange constraint.

If you really want you can define bold italic text using some styling magic, but that's quite awkward.

> IIRC, nesting of inline markup is generally not possible. It works in Markdown…

How do you write <i><b>x</b>y</i> in Markdown (without using HTML tags)?

Maybe Markdown doesn't allow arbitrary nesting of inline markup, but the combinations I actually wanted so far work. With reStructuredText, OTOH, I ran into limitations even though I didn't try to commit typographic atrocities.

_**x**y_ works fine, I tried on GitHub: https://gist.github.com/remram44/8cd460aef9020aa53d538b82cb4...

Oops, I forgot that underscores are a thing :D

Yes, and this sucks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com