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Comment by MoonWalk | Hacker News Reader

So the markup dialect that's widely used but suffers from a near-total lack of viewers will now finally be rendered as intended, at least on Windows?

Markdown presents a chicken-&-egg scenario that has dragged on for decades: tons of Markdown documents, but almost nothing with which to simply view (not edit) them as intended. Mystifying.

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The point of markdown is that it is human-readable not only in "rendered" html form, but plain text too.

I think this explains the lack of viewers; they are simply not needed.

That doesn't explain it since that point is theoretical, in reality markdown is poorly readable even for the basics (table with a few bold red words in a cell easily breaks alignment / readability)

(also seeing all those marks isn't aesthetically good, hence the need for a viewer)

No, it doesn't. First, I don't know what you mean by "HTML form." It's not HTML at all.

Second: If the formatting codes are going to be ignored by all the viewing applications, why are they in the document in the first place?

Every time this comes up, someone floats this weird "but all you need is a text viewer" argument... indicating that Markdown is pointless.

https://github.com/rabfulton/ViewMD

Markdown viewer for Linux

Thanks for the reference.

At this point I really think GitHub should formally publish their flavor as well as a default implementation. It's likely the single most widely used variant online at this point.

I know there are others and there are fine points. I would like to see a couple minor additions to support image placement (that aligns with Medium's editor) and finally a strike-through text notation. But that's about it.

Github does publish their spec: https://github.github.com/gfm/ The CommonMark spec is largely based on it.

I used to write documentation in Markdown manually. About a year ago I started using a VSCode extension to tell me if there are minor errors in the documents, but nothing else.

What did you expect readers to view your documentation with?

PowerToys had a Markdown renderer for the Preview window added in version 0.16.0, which was released around late March 2020.

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