Hacker News Reader

Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

The problem with markdown is that it's not extensible and that there is no spec. Essentially all READMEs would be better off using typst, they would make for better READMEs.

View on HN

I do not think that is the problem with markdown lol. There are lots of problems with markdown, especially vanilla or the more limited versions of it - but really its super power is that it is readable with a regular text editor (or `cat`) and can be rendered without a compilation step.

Markdown is not competing with latex or typst, it is competing with (and has won against) .txt files

Actually basic typst is as readable as markdown, e.g. this is the example from the webapp:

  = The Typst Playground

  Welcome to the Typst Playground! This is a sandbox where you can experiment with Typst. You can type anywhere in the editor panel on the left. The preview panel to the right will update live.
  
  = Basics <basics>
  
  Typst is a _markup_ language. You use it to express not just the content, but also the structure and formatting of your document. For example, surrounding a word with underscores _emphasizes_ it with italics and starting a line with an equals sign creates a section heading.
  
  Typst has lightweight syntax like this for the most common formatting needs. Among other things, you can use it to:
  
  - *Strongly emphasize* some text
  - Refer to @basics
  - Typeset math: $a, b in { 1/2, sqrt(4 a b) }$
  
  That's just the surface though! Typst has powerful systems for scripting, styling, introspection, and more. In the realm of a Typst document, there is nothing you can't automate.

As I said in a previous comment typst especialy with extending via scripting stops being plain text readable. A Markdown file (whatever flavor it may be) is still fundamentaly one vi,nano, Editor, Notepad++ away from being read with all its context included. It is a tradeoff that for READMES I would not want to make.

If you restrict typat to the basic functionally of markdown it is just as readable as plain text (not surprising considering that typat syntax was inspirered by markdown). However, once we include more unusual things I would argue that markdown becomes more illegible than typst (as for markdown you start adding html essentially).

There have been theoretically precise published specs for serious markdowns for 15 years. The commonmark convention is a common specification for many including e.g the familiar simple github variant, which emphatically does have a completely perfect specification.

Commonmark isn't serious because it doesn't include several major quality of life improvements like [^1] for footnote/reference syntax. Pandoc should be the serious "common" markdown standard.

It is perfectly serious, though hobbled by various recalcitrant forces. For example, if I write using only ye olde original markdown devices, pandoc will render as it would commonmark. The core commonmark idea is to have an unambiguous specification of /the original syntax/ -- which emphatically didnt exist: the perl regex script was the only actual specification.

Part of the problem is that people want to say 'markdown' but John Gruber, pissing on the corpse of Aaron Schwarz, falsely claims total possession of everything that comes under that head, and that there must be no independent specification. This simple fact totally destroys the entire milieu. 80% of complaints about 'markdown' are due to his recalcitrance. Thus there can be no spec, no spec specifying extensions, etc. He does not want anything like html to be defined as he will lose ... I'm not sure what, since he is deeply evil, as this one case shows with total clarity. Industrial interests would be enough to get an html-like convention if it were otherwise.

Of course it's extensible, you can put HTML in it, and HTML is extensible.

That is like saying "Ruby is not slow, you can write native extensions in C". No, Markdown is not extensible.

Ruby is extensible as well, these things flourish because their creators thought hard about escape hatches. The things that are not extensible we don't talk about because they already died.

But you can't abstract. I can't make a custom template for an image + caption, and use it throughout my markdown document.

You can do some pretty wild stuff with html. But if you do, you get an unreadable jumble of markdown and HTML. It loses the single advantage of markdown - which is that its human readable as a text file.

HTML is human readable as a text file. It does lack abstraction though. I don't actually like markdown much but it is quicker for prose and when I want my images styled a certain way I drop to HTML

> HTML is human readable as a text file.

It's horrible to read compared to markdown and typst.

    <p>Some cool <em>sentence</em> in <b>html!</b></p>

    Some cool *sentence* in **markdown!**

Reply on news.ycombinator.com