Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

The appeal is twofold: a lot of engines now understand it and it is (relatively) easy to write by hand. (Except for the bloody links, writing the HTML for them is much easier than the equivalent markdown, I do it infrequently enough that I always mix up the brackets or the order (or both...).)

View on HN

The way to remember it is just that you're parenthesizing the URL. Naturally, you might write it "look at this thing (http://example.com)" - in Markdown, you do the same, but with brackets to indicate where you want the link to show up. "look at [this thing](http://example.com)"

I don't buy for a second that <a href="http://example.com">this thing</a> is more intuitive than that, even if you disagree about the specific brackets used.

"a href" isn't intuitive, but it's memorable.

Yeah, honestly, I think more verbose formatting is much easier to remember than a bunch of punctuation.

The way I remember it is that it looks like function call. so () is at the end thus [] must be first :)

[this links looks like function in most languages](link function argument)

I understand the herd effect - so I put it in user-facing projects that I'm working on - but I don't understand what's driving the herd. Specifically, I don't see any advantages over asciidoc and find it awful to work with.

edit: I do understand this project, though. It'll get rid of the horribleness in implementing markdown, at least.

> I don't see any advantages over asciidoc

Reddit uses Markdown. GitHub uses Markdown. HN (sorta) uses Markdown. Wordpress, Tumblr, and Discourse all use Markdown. If I used Markdown for my own User-Generated-Content Textareas™, people might already know it.

If I use Asciidoc, I may as well be using SGML. It's just another (nice!) syntax you're forcing people to cram into their brains.

I'd never heard of asciidoc before this thread. I suspect asciidoc suffered from being associated with docbook? And perhaps it's just that Perl was much more popular for writing forums in than Python, at the time.

Actually, as a C++11 user, it's a lot like a lambda declaration: [capture](parameters){…}. Certainly the brackets are in the same order. The similarity between lambdas and Markdown URL's is actually a nice feedback loop when I'm doing C++11 code.

Square the circle! [] () Just like the old geometry problem. :)

Nice mnemonic. I'll try to remember that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com