accordionclown

rest (restructured text) has been used for python documentation for a very long time. so -- especially for that particular usage -- it's much more functional and clearly documented and consistent and free of edge-cases than (the far-too-numerous flavors of) markdown.

on the negative side, there aren't many quality authoring-tools for rest.

markdown has a very high profile. but it's questionable whether it deserves it. (i wouldn't say that it doesn't. but i wouldn't say that it does, either.)

another option you could look at is asciidoc. it isn't clearly better or worse than those other two systems, but it is different, and you might end up liking it better. (or you might not.)

light-markup systems are much like static blog systems. there's a lot of them, but it's hard to decide among them, and many people end up inventing their own variant that serves their own individual use-cases.

dean allen never got the respect or the credit he deserved.

where most people are trying to "monetize" the web, his focus was on making it more "humane". it's still not too late to see that he was right.

very interesting history, jesse. been observing your work for a long time. loved the reference to the canon cat (not "cannon"). also tickled by the idea of downloading a .pdf from "ftp.apple.asimov.net" with "jefraskin" in its name; 2017 giving props to the past. never really understood the benefit of "folding" per se, since anything not shown on the screen is "out of sight" anyway. albeit an outline view is great, especially when you can click into any section. nonetheless, love the fact that you (and others) continue experimenting with the plain-text writing interface. keep on keeping on.

i've noticed that, whenever an adult enters the picture, hobbes turns from a bundle of energy into a paper tiger.

i'm sure very few people care that you and i disagree.

gruber didn't "invent" markdown.

he took the idea from dean allen, who had created "textile" (which was featured in the movabletype blogging-system gruber used).

gruber reworked that idea slightly, then released it with a catchy name, and somehow received all the credit.

as for gruber's blog, i would say it is evenhanded and informative, albeit focused on apple and its products. the blog is certainly not "fawning", and i think most apple-buyers feel no need to "justify" their purchases.

much of the time, you want the output to sync to the input.

but oftentimes you don't.

the trick is finding a good way to walk that tightrope.

a separate preview is unnecessary for some users, it's true.

but when you're using a full range of complex features, it is.

and when something isn't displaying the way you intend, you often need to view the input _with_ the output, to see exactly what's causing the problem and to test possible solutions.

i also found that, while typora is good at showing what the output looks like in a browser-window which is sized exactly like the one you are typing in, it's less informative at showing what the content will look like in a .pdf or a .mobi or an .epub.

and, just for the sake of completion here, typora also became very unresponsive when i tested it with large files. again, not everyone will have that problem, but some users definitely will.

but i'll give typora another go, and see if it's improved since i last tried it...

that link is a generic one, to an account's own gists. it is not a link to your gists, _except_ for you.

there's more than enough room for everyone.

indeed, there will be demand for more/different products even after both of these competitors maximize their reach.

maria wants to have a browser that runs smoothly even when it has as many as 5000 tabs open.

a proposal is made...

"we built a workflow that allowed one person to ruin the company."

that's one heckuva excuse, dude.

it's great seeing a poem by a poet i know.

for the record, jeffrey mcdaniel is also a fantastic performer, so if you get a chance to see him recite, don't sleep on it.

i can't remember who i heard it from first, but "squaring the circle" is the phrase that (finally!) helped me remember the order after years of having to look it up every single time i needed it.

i still have to look up the format for images every time.

ok, fine. but then he has to give the knighthood back.

  > "the web must remain a universal medium, open to all  
  > and not biasing the information it conveys..."

and the macarthur fellowship too, along with its cash.

and somehow retract that big flashy olympic ceremony.

if you think you have truly found something new -- and i must admit i was naturally skeptical at first, but you convinced me that you'd done _some_ homework -- then don't be discouraged by the people who say "it's probably not novel". maybe it's not, but people do discover new things every day. heck, the odds are that you will never win a half-a-billion dollars in a lottery, but last week a woman actually did.

  > But your comment doesn't substantiate
  > what isn't modern about HN UX; 
  > anything other than lack of 
  > an advanced editor with live preview?

maybe i'm missing some things.

how do i tell it not to show me comments i displayed earlier?

or show me comments made since a certain time?

or arrange the comments in chronological order? or reverse?

these are some functionalities that i would like to have...

looking forward to examining your tool and its output, rhythmus!

1a. .pdf is a fine format.

1b. unless -- as is increasingly the case these days -- you're reading it on a screen smaller than the one for which the .pdf was designed, in which case .pdf is an awful format.

2a. .epub is a fine format.

2b. unless you're reading it in a viewer-app which is wonky, which most of them are. (the inconsistencies of rendering with this so-called "standard" are unbelievably bad, and seem to be getting worse rather than better as time goes on.)

3a. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of a .pdf, you often get some really bad stuff that loses a lot of important styling.

3b. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of an .epub, it's not much better.

4a. the standard line is that an .epub is just "a website packaged into a .zip file", implying that anything you can do on a website can be done in an .epub.

4b. the standard line is a lie. an .epub requires .xhtml rather than .html, and a complex mess of associated files, and most .epub viewer-apps have trouble supporting the full gamut of .css, and also do not allow you to use javascript at all.

conclusion: the state of sharing documents on the web in a way that allows offline use while enabling the convenient re-use of text is a sad state indeed.

your showcase is an excellent idea!

the huge array of static-site generators today is amazing, as a demonstration of the creativity of developers, but it makes it difficult to sort out all of the contenders.

a head-to-head matchup, on the same material, is a fantastic way to make an informed decision to cut through the clutter.

nobody seems to want to serve files.

dropbox once offered, but has stopped.

github is about the only place that'll do it nowadays.

just avoid the middleman and get your own site.

-bowerbird

great start!

i could've used more clarity on how to enter/exit edit-mode; maybe that's just my failure to read instructions carefully, but you don't wanna lose people like me right at the outset.

back from the school reunion.

my only note now is that i was never trying to "persuade" you. or anyone else. think whatever you like, wrong or right.

rather than a flock of templates with different fonts, i'd suggest some simple javascript that lets the users choose their preferred font from a generous assortment.

> They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown.

it's fairly easy to get the brain-dead part "right". even down to replicating gruber's original bugs and his corner-case complications.

> They are inconsistent in their extensions.

that's precisely my point. and the crux of the problem.

> Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms

markdown's markup did not differ significantly from that of asciidoc or restructured-text. all of them, including setext, leveraged existing conventions from e-mail and usenet.

> and to emphasize readability over all else

since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown, i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously, other than that is part of the origin story mythology.

> I think that's highly simplistic, and ignores the realities.

due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed.

the _only_ reason markdown was the choice of the masses was because it looked "easier" to a lazy tl;dr mentality. which is a false economy for which the light-markup revolution will have to continue to pay for years down the line.

well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too.

at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion, so the last move here will be yours, if you choose to make it. we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway.

gruber's brain-dead version _has_ been replaced. by better versions. the problem is these "better versions" are all inconsistent with each other. and each of them has an installed base which insists that the egg be cracked on their preferred end.

if instead of adopting markdown, people would have extracted a small subset of asciidoc (which predated markdown) or restructured-text (which also predated markdown) to serve the brain-dead use-cases that markdown claimed, those subsets would've been just as "simple" to learn, but also leveraged more cleanly when people sought to extend the light-markup toolkit to longer-form documents.

but the blogosphere thought it was hot shit back then, and took great delight in pushing things viral. ergo markdown. so now we're stuck in a bad situation.

gruber's original markdown is "simple" because it's brain-dead.

which is why so many people had to "extend" it with different "flavors", which has now created a massive mess of inconsistencies.

sometimes worse is better. and sometimes it's just plain worse. and sometimes it's the worst kind of situation you could ever imagine.

dr. ed said:

> If I'm extracting content from works, I prefer source (LaTeX, Markdown, DocBook, etc.). Though that's another story.

except it's not actually another story. it's just a different part of the same story. and a format (like .pdf) which only handles one part of the story well (such as reading) but falls apart on another part (like text reuse) is not -- ultimately -- a good solution.

but that doesn't mean .pdf is worthless. yes, it's worthless as an archival format, and as a distribution format. (and those two are the ones which people commonly pitch as _strengths_ of .pdf, unfortunately, which is misguided.)

but .pdf is fine as a one-off output-format, spun out in an on-demand fashion by an end-user who wants .pdf for their own personal reasons (which require no justification to us). this is what you mention at the end of your comment, and i, too, am working on that...

pshaw.

right now, today, tuesday june 13th, 2017, safari will not open a .pdf to a specific page or bookmark, neither on the desktop nor in ios.

chrome can. firefox can. but safari cannot. which means neither the iphone nor the ipad can do it.

imagine if -- on the web -- you couldn't deep-link to an anchor in the middle of a webpage, but merely to (the top of) the webpage itself.

that's not the only deficiency of the .pdf format. it's not even the most galling one. it's just the one that happens to be hamstringing a certain project of mine at the moment. and it's illustrative.

there are 89 flavors of markdown.

there will never be a standard markdown.

and not just because of xkcd927...

if you have a muddy puddle, you can't make it clear by adding more dirt. you have to replace all the muddy water with clear water.

markdown needs to be abandoned, and replaced with a superior version of light-markup.

(unfortunately, neither restructured-text nor asciidoc is superior.)

sooner or later -- probably later -- the tech sphere will see the need to do that replacement. until then, it would be a major disservice to assert markdown upon the world-at-large.