

About 1400 Words of Skepticism about Markdown, and an Imagined Alternative - rhythmvs
http://cforster.com/2015/06/markdown-skepticism/

======
teaneedz
I'm a huge fan of _Markdown_ because it frees up extra taps/pecks on the
keyboard with the knowledge that my final document is portable and
understandable in its raw unrendered plain text to non-techies.

I expect all my documents to be web friendly also. Markdown ensures that extra
tweaks (more work) will not be necessary when rendering my MD file for the
web.

Blockquotes inside paragraphs are harder on the eyes - best kept as block
elements for web reading.

Inline quotes are sufficiant for snippets of quotes within paragraphs - for
most use-cases.

Markdown keeps things simple while enforcing good web writing practises for
non-HTML folks or those of us who just want to focus on content and not tags
in my opinion. I guess the semantic web is less a concern for me with Markdown
because I'm focused on the final deliverable, a willing trade-off of a little
non-semantic for the portability and readability benefits.

The bottom line for me is producing content with the least barriers. MD always
seems to fit the bill.

~~~
greggman
I've found markdown failing for me for very simple things.

Someone suggested ASCIIDOC as an alternative with similar feeling of being
easily editable and readable as is. This was posted on HN a while ago

[https://medium.com/@chacon/living-the-future-of-technical-
wr...](https://medium.com/@chacon/living-the-future-of-technical-
writing-2f368bd0a272)

------
thristian
I get the feeling this is one of the reasons John Gruber was so annoyed by the
CommonMark effort - he felt his invention, the thing he called 'Markdown', was
the idea of a human-friendly pidgin syntax for a more complex markup format.
His _personal_ Markdown implementation happened to target HTML, because that's
what he personally needed, but I guess he expected all kinds of markdowns for
all kinds of document syntaxes, with varying similarity to the one he wrote
himself.

The idea of constraining Markdown to one particular syntax targeting one
particular document type must have seemed like epically missing the point...
which is a common outcome when a new idea meets popular approval.

From that point of view, Markdown's nearest relative would be AsciiDoc, which
is a toolkit for making simple pidgins for the DocBook XML syntax. That tool
happens to come with some reasonable defaults you can use as a base, but sure
enough there's now the AsciiDoctor tool, which hard-codes AsciiDoc's defaults
instead of re-implementing the generic framework.

~~~
maxerickson
I'm pretty sure he was irritated they tried to appropriate the name.

Gruber's logic is something like: I named my thing Markdown, please don't use
that name without my permission (read the third term of the license:
[http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license)
).

The logic of the (at the time) Standard Markdown people was something like:
screw that, you aren't even making any of the changes we need to your project.

------
znpy
Did you guys try Emacs' org-mode? I feel its syntax to be similar to markdown
but way more powerful.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's on my list to try, and I've watched a number of demos (the YouTube
video of the Google Talk is quite impressive).

But... I use vim ;-)

------
mdpm
So, something like jade then? If your annoyances are semantics and the
verbosity of other markups. Roll your own semantics with +mixins, and
otherwise, just write HTML, without the fluff?

Human readable, concise, fluent, and HTML is a lingua franca of its own. Even
in jade, I still make frequent use of the :md filter for simple text, but
otherwise, structure is utterly up to you. Markdown alone doesn't quite cut it
even for CMS style 'content-block-goes-here' editing.

~~~
mercurial
Jade is a templating engine, not a markup language as such.

Personally, I don't understand the persistent popularity of Markdown in the
face of a much better alternative like Restructured Text, where the extension
story is _not_ an alternative between "hope this flavour of Markdown does what
you want" and "just write HTML". Even something simple like tables is not
covered by the Markdown "spec".

~~~
mdpm
yes, but the author's issues with markdown are limitations of a limited
markup. markdown is appealing thanks to the lack of verbosity, hence jade -
terse, simple, yet extensible. markdown is nigh one-dimensional, your content
should fit in a box, and offers little ability to provide semantics. HTML /
XML are overly verbose, and painful for novice / non-technical users. a subset
of jade solves these eloquently for me.

------
dredmorbius
First off, Chris expand your acronyms. LaTeX is sufficiently well known
there's no need for that. The Text Encoding Initiative, (which doesn't seem to
be an actual encoding standard?), despite being active since the 1980s, and my
own use of various markup systems since about the same time, was unknown to
me:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_Encoding_Initiative)

Even knowing that, it's not clear what problem exactly TEI solves.

Second: what's your goal? _How are you looking to use Markdown?_

For offline use in your _own_ document preparation activities, I think Chris
answered his own question. Markdown is extensible via HTML. If you want to use
_semantic_ elements such as <em>emphasized text</em> or <cite>Some Famous
Book</cite>, then simply include those elements within your own source
document.

A lot of us are using Markdown on third-party sites -- for myself it turns up
on Reddit, Ello, Diaspora, and StackExchange ... in a mazy of twisty passages,
all different. And I really _don 't_ have control over what's parsed or
supported (Ello's lack of blockquote and Reddit's lack of images both drive me
equally nuts).

To a large extent, for works of a few dozen to 10,000 words, possibly even
longer, _heading structured documents work great_. Markdown is just that: a
quick and only slightly dirty way to create content for which presentation
specification (e.g., bold and italic specs) is more than sufficient. I mean,
yeah, it's fucking wonderful that HTML has, _in theory_ , all this wonderful
semantic markup. Dig into the source of pretty much any site out there, with
_very_ few exceptions, and you'll find they're simply butchered. Table layouts
and <font> directives for titles and headings and absolute positioning all
over the page.... Or worse, custom styles which make even <i> and <b> look
stunningly attractive.

If anything, documents tend to go to the _other_ extreme: too many entities,
too much markup, too much crud, too much design. To the point that I'm far too
frequently scraping raw text from documents and rebuilding them (usually with
Markdown) to a simple basic PDF or HTML page _that I can actually fucking
read._

OCD, it's a hell of a drug.

My suggestion: get over it.

 _You cannot get both a SIMPLE and a COMPLETE markup language._ One is the
enemy of the other.

Settle for good enough.

The problems I've got with Markdown (or any of the other lightweight markup
languages:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language))
is that standards aren't, parsers and interpreters (particularly on third-
party sites) vary and/or suck, and stuff I'd really like to see (superscript,
subscript, footnot, ToC generators, equation support) aren't well supported.
Hell, we can't even rely on blockquotes, images, character escaping, and
superscripts being uniformly treated.

Use Mardown. Or switch to another LWML. And extend it with HTML. Use post-
processing scripts to add those div wrappers and metadata you want (I'm
basically doing the same for my own work).

The one other element that might make sense, and which you don't address, is a
document standard -- I'd _really_ appreciate if documents had standard
metadata: title, author, publication date. Something vaguely like an RFC #822
of text document metadata (and fortunately we've got *so many standards to
choose from:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_standards](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_standards)
\-- Ob xkcd 927).

It's also not clear how or why LaTeX itself isn't suitable here. It's
plaintext, more structured than Markdown, yet generally easier to code than
HTML.

I do appreciate the tip on ScholarlyMarkdown, which looks like it might
address a few of my own interests.

~~~
ams6110
I never really understood the point of these simplified markup languages. I
see Markdown and ReST being pushed on non-technical writers who just don't
want to use a text-based markup language. They want Word, or Google Docs, or a
rich edit box, or something like that.

As for me, yeah I like writing in plain text but given the choice I'd rather
just write in HTML which I already know, rather than use something like
Markdown. I don't find Markdown to be particularly time-saving or easier to
use. Or if I'm writing something where I particularly care about beautiful
typesetting or I need a table of contents and an index I'll use LaTeX which
has been developed for decades specifically for scholarly and technical
writing.

~~~
agumonkey
These users want familiarity, and get false simplicity / silo-lock-in. I'm not
fond of giving emacs to everyone anymore, but even the simple fact of showing
that simple text can be transformed into formatted beauty can open their mind.

Otherwise, IMO, they don't understand they have a computer wanting to compute
for them, they see a weird typewriter simulator that they should appease as
much as possible otherwise that god might crash taking their hard (because the
software is obscure) work down the drain.

Now I also find markdown good enough. Headers, paragraphs, lists, quotes,
links... Gruber's page list 10 kinds, easy to remember for anyone; balanced,
minimal and generic document feature set.

