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Comment by DidYaWipe | Hacker News Reader

Except that they aren't shown as bullets, headers, or bold unless your viewer understands the Markdown codes that invoke those decorations. Which is what I'm decrying the lack of.

My "alternative" is to have DEDICATED, lightweight Markdown viewers. The major OSes have long come with a simple text-file viewer that can render RTF. Why not Markdown?

In the meantime, I'm mystified as to why the format is so rampant when there is so little support for it.

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The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting codes intutitively make sense and are readable even without a viewer and without needing to read a specification first. People have been using asterisks as bullet points and to emphasise things long before anyone came up with Markdown.

Maybe it doesn't to you, but it does to most people.

An update to Microsoft Notepad which renders Markdown is currently being rolled out: https://blogs.windows.com/windows-insider/2025/05/30/text-fo...

Well, that's nice about Notepad.

I'm not sure I agree *something* is intuitive for italic and **something else** is intuitive for bold, or that this is intuitively a block quote:

> #### The quarterly results look great!

> - Revenue was off the chart.

> - Profits were higher than ever.

> > Everything is going according to *plan*.

">" was the quotation symbol used by email clients for decades. See mutt, elm.

Yep, sure was.

Typically, italic formatting indicates gentle emphasis, bold formatting indicates strong emphasis. Given this, * and * make sense. However, typically people use _ for gentle emphasis in Markdown, which makes _even more_ sense. Be careful not to confuse specification of rendering,

As for - and >, they've been in use in plain text email clients for bulleted lists and quotations for 35 years now [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#:~:text=The%20co...

I'm not confusing anything. I'm saying that the example I provided is not intuitively recognizable as a block quote. And it gets worse when you have more nested decorations.

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