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Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

> If they want to add styling

The problem for a lot of users is the disconnect between a logical style (the actual boldness of the text) and representations of that style. If you haven't learned to handle this kind of abstract symbolism, plain text markup formats just don't make sense to you. Your brain instead registers it as a combination of "this editor doesn't have bold for some reason" and "the computer garbled my copy and made parts of it bold for some reason" without ever drawing the connection between one and the other.

This is only really an issue in places where abstract thought is seen as an innate ability which can only be tested for and not taught to people. Unfortunately this includes the US.

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I read your comment several times. I don't understand the distinction you're making. I feel dumb. Could you explain it in another way? I'm sure your comment has value, I just don't understand it.

In languages like Markdown and Textile, one doesn't need to worry about presentation, it's all about semantics.

The distinction I'm alluding to is simply "the map is not the territory." In other words, in the same way that you can have something which represents a tiger without actually being a tiger (eg. the word "tiger") you can have something which represents "the boldness of this text" without literally being the boldness of that text. The double asterisk notation in Markdown, and the <b> tag in HTML, are symbols for the boldness of the text they annotate.

What I'm saying is that untrained users have trouble with the idea, fundamental to markup languages, that some text can represent attributes of other text. To such users, an asterisk means "the text has an asterisk in it." They cannot reinterpret asterisks as markup without relearning the way they look at text itself. They're used to having the territory laid out in front of them, and all of a sudden you're handing them one map and asking them to write another, but they don't know what a map is.

The distinction is exactly that between

    <p><b>some text</b></p>

and

    <style type="text/css">
      .emphasized { font-weight: bold; }
    </style>

    <!-- [...] -->

    <p class="emphasized">some text</p>

One specifies "this text shall be bold"; the other specifies "the semantics of this text require that it be emphasized", with precisely what 'emphasized' means handled elsewhere, in the CSS which defines how the class 'emphasized' shall be rendered -- which, given appropriate media queries, might appear entirely differently depending on whether the document is rendered to a large screen, a small screen, to print, &c., &c.

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