Hacker News Reader

Markdown only? That's not "getting out of the way", it's limiting the ways of expression. Getting out of the way is providing simple defaults, why not depraving those who need more tools (HTML/CSS) of richer features.

View on HN

HTML is part of the "specification" of Markdown. And you really want to "spice up" your markup with CSS? I'd rather spent the time on content.

I'd say you might want to spice up HTML with CSS if you want to achieve anything like font styling, positioning and so on. Spending time on content doesn't substitute spending time on presenting it the way you want. Blogger for example allows doing all that.

A very simple and practical example where Markdown offers no help: how can you change rtl and ltr directions of the text without CSS?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com