Hacker News Reader

markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse; there are so many ambiguities; CommonMark is so complex because of that and still has so many ambiguities.

it's like YAML: it looks so simple at first, and then the horrors start if you try to use it seriously.

in both cases the most horrors lie in the spaces/tabs/newlines.

View on HN

> markdown is horrible, horrible format to parse...

I agree entirely. But it's a lovely format to use. Programming as a profession is entirely about making things easier for our users, even if it means making things harder for ourselves.

After all, that's the whole ethos around the web as a platform. Throw some broken HTML soup at a browser and it'll still try its best to render it.

That is true, modern HTML is also (from what I heard!) hard to parse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com