Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

I think the bigger problem is that apps that don't need/shouldn't use markdown reach for it as a default and build upon it when they would have been served better investing in richer markup.

Take ulysses (mentioned in the article) for example. It has grown into a full-fledged writing and word processing application, but its being based on markdown originally has only hampered that. They've had to implement all of these clunky extensions and features in terms of markdown, and as the post states, try to hide the fact that it's all markdown to make it feel more like a classic word processor. At this point it just makes the whole experience clunky. People that just want to write markdown deal with weird extensions and frustrating syntax hiding, people that don't need to learn some minimal markdown just to use a word processor...

It's 2024. I hope companies start to realize that markdown is a fantastic solution for certain cases but it is not the only solution. Some applications really are better served by more complex, but much more expressive markup languages, especially if they are going to shield the user from it all anyways.

Couldn't agree more.

I find that I'll choose Markdown (assuming it's a choice) when I expect multi-modal consumption... where a given text will in some contexts simply be presented as-is using plain text and the text can also take advantage of rendering into a more styled presentation.

I write in-database comments (e.g. PostgreSQL's `COMMENT ON [...]`) using Markdown for this reason. My go-to database documentation tool of choice (https://schemaspy.org) will very nicely render the Markdown into styled documentation integrated into the rest of the documentation it generates, but the plain text rendering when I'm looking at those same comments via `psql`, where no Markdown rendering is applied, still look decent due to how Markdown works.

Ulysses? Take an app with a MUCH wider audience: WhatsApp!

They use Markdown-esque syntax for message formatting. It mostly is Markdown, with a single caveat that gets me a lot: *Single asterisks* become bold, instead of italic. For italics, you have to use _underscores_.

Other syntax works fine. Slack also uses Markdown. In summary that's nice as it is just one single syntax to remember across systems. I wouldn't enjoy too much that every app started having its own different, more expressive syntax, at least not for apps which their primary job is communication, not text edition.

It really annoys me that services can't decide if * is bold or italics. It makes the most sense to me as italics, so when I use whatsapp or youtube I always get annoyed that it did the wrong one

I can't comprehend why * wouldn't be bold. Given that underlining is how you italics when you can't italics, _ makes perfect sense.

> Given that underlining is how you italics when you can't italics

In my experience underlining is how you bold when you can't bold.

In my experience, underscores are how you underline when you can't underline. Asterisks are emphasis, which is typically italics.

That's completely true, but emphasis is normally rendered by italics too. (See for example the <em> element in HTML with the default CSS.) Emphasis is the semantic, italics is the presentation. From this perspective both underscores and single asterisks should render into italics.

> emphasis is normally rendered by italics too

I wasn't disagreeing with that; edited my comment to be clear. Asterisks are emphasis; emphasis is typically italics.

I do think that underscores should have been underlining, but unfortunately that's not what Markdown chose.

> are how you underline when you can't underline

Underscores/underline were a hint on a manuscript to the typesetter that you wanted italic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underscore). It later became a way to add emphasis (either italic or bold styling) on typewriters as there wasn't a practical way to have bold and italic versions of every character on a mechanical typewriter.

Most professionally typeset content (i.e., optimised for legibility through years of experience rather than just whatever your word processor will allow) will not contain underlined content (https://practicaltypography.com/underlining.html).

FWIW, https://style.mla.org/underscore-instead-of-italics/

> In handwritten and typewritten material—where italics are impossible to render—titles of works normally italicized, words used as words, and letters used as letters are underlined:

What in the world does "words used as words" mean?

“What in the world does _words_used_as_words_ mean?” would be a valid way of formatting that question according to the guide: that's what they mean.

> “What in the world does _words_used_as_words_ mean?” would be a valid way of formatting that question according to the guide: that's what they mean.

I think you are answering my question, but I still don't understand. How else than as words would words be used? Are you saying that the underlining here is serving the purpose of quotation marks?

When you are for example referring to some word or phrase instead of trying to use it in its normal place in the grammar of a sentence. Mean can have many meanings. You may be more familiar using quotes for that.

https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/N...

Ah, thank you.

CAPS is how you bold when you can't bold.

Funny of you to say that so authoritatively when you're only demonstrating my point: there is no one correct way to replace bold text when you can't use bold text.

For decades (centuries?) in German, s p a c i n g was how you “bolded” (or italicized) when your typesetter couldn’t. Very elegant solution once your eye adjusts to it.

I’ve been using Markdown since 2006 and for me it’s always been:

*emphasis* (i.e. italic)

**strong emphasis** (i.e. bold)

You can use underscores in exactly the same way, but the reason I’ve stuck purely to asterisks is that it’s just slightly easier to type and I think it’s slightly more readable when I’m reading an un-rendered Markdown document, so I appreciate the syntax that John Gruber chose here.

Underlining always looks like hyperlinks now.

* was to bold or to emphasize stuff way before markdown was even a thing. That's how I remember the early days of the web in the early 0's.

I think the issue is "bold *or* emphasize". There's not a universal consensus on whether or not emphasis is italics or bold.

See also: Imperial v/s Metric. :-)

> Slack also uses Markdown.

No it doesn't. It uses something they call mrkdwn, which is only vaguely superficially similar to Markdown. In most important places, mrkdwn has made different decisions from Markdown. It's a completely different, and far more rudimentary, Lightweight Markup Language.

it's better than whatever Microsoft Teams makes you use.

Teams (and I believe Slack too) uses what I call MS Word formatting (They call it "Auto format as you type"). A lot of the markup you can do in teams came from elements that do the same in Word/Outlook/etc.

In my defense I'll say that with that "also" in my mind I was thinking on the previous phrase, so I was referring to a "Markdown-esque syntax for message formatting"...

Nevertheless, good catch

Markdown is build on popular custom syntax from mails and other message-platforms. WhatsApp is probably doing the same. Similar problem exist with all the other simple markup-languages, doing the same. At the end, there is only limited syntax available for those cases, those they are destined to have similarities and duplicates.

Wait. In my Slack asterisks mean bold too.

Of course you can use any number of ways to implement rich text or formatting. A lot of people want Markdown because of the portability of plain text. Markdown has served as a good mechanism for plain text formats that still can do a bit more. Ulysses would lose a significant portion of its audience if it moved to it's own syntax or some form of rich text or its own binary. A new audience would likely become interested-- though fighting Microsoft Word is ... hard to say the least.

Maybe that's where Ulysses wants to go, and its own implementation of some non-standard elements suggests that. But I also know people who will not use Ulysses because of its non-standard Markdown elements resulting in files that are less portable.

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