Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown | Hacker News Reader

Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown

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13 pointsshawndumas13 comments

I think the coolest and maybe most misunderstood part of Markdown is that it is designed to make README files into reasonable HTML. In the process of designing something that made for human readable text files that can be easily translated into HTML it became one of the biggest text input standards on the internet.

Like JSON, on its own, Markdown is a nice little tool, but what people have picked up and done with Markdown is really inspiring.

This is wrong. Gruber designed Markdown for writing blog entries, so Wordpress is using it for the original purpose. README files are just one of these additional purposes you allude to in your last sentence.

Also, Markdown is not a standard (yet), and the ecosystem suffers greatly for it.

If we're chasing the canonical rabbit, Markdown wasn't designed for any specific purpose. It was designed upon a core principle: that Markdown's syntax should be as readable as possible. That is, Markdown should be readable before it has been converted to any specific machine-readable format.

Straight from the author:

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.

http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

... or you could just use the WYSIWYG editor that's built into WordPress and is far more effortless to work with :)

Clicking a bunch of buttons definitely seems easier than just writing some simple Markdown.

You can use hotkeys in the WYSIWYG editor.

In this text, we can do CTRL-B bold CTRL-B and CTRL-I italic CTRL-I words.

as opposed to

In this text, we can do SHIFT-8 SHIFT-8 bold SHIFT-8 SHIFT-8 and SHIFT-8 italic SHIFT-8 words.

And, happily, there's a separate hotkey for bold and italic that makes sense (I and B) as opposed to having to remember that one asterisk is bold and two asterisks is italic. No, wait, it's the other way around.

Uh. I write every document in Pandoc Markdown.

Why isn't everyone adopting Jade instead?

What is it?

It's a templating language [1], but it seems a lot of developers (myself included) use it to DOM description language, just like HTML or XML. Better yet, people replace those languages with Jade!

[1] https://github.com/visionmedia/jade

Do you mean the template engine, or is there a different one? I'd never heard of it, and a nodejs template engine [1] is the best my Google-fu could find.

If that's it, Jade looks like a specific way to specify HTML documents, which is probably the biggest use-case for Markdown, but not the only one. It's important to also have a generic markup language for "documents" in general, not just HTML pages. For example, I spent most of the day today writing R code in an Rmarkdown document which allows my data analysis to be somewhat self-documenting. If I had to use an HTML-specific markup language, it wouldn't have worked real well, and I might as well have just used LaTex.

[1] https://github.com/visionmedia/jade

I had never heard of it until now, but now that I've seen Jade, it doesn't seem like a replacement for Markdown at all. I use MD to add semantics, formatting, and links to text. 99% of the Markdown documents on my computer will never be rendered as HTML.

Because Jade requires you to know how HTML works. Markdown (and WordPress.com) are made for people who want to focus on making their content, so they shouldn’t have to worry about that - the technology shouldn’t get in their way.

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