
My principled objection to Markdown - bpierre
http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/second-tutorial.html#%28part._.Prelude__my_principled_objection_to_.Markdown%29
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rehevkor5
While you see yourself as objecting to Markdown, I see you as objecting to
other templating languages. For example, a PHP file can do what you are doing,
but it will have the full feature set of PHP available and it doesn't
necessarily have a great API for working with a DOM. You could say the same of
something like Apache Velocity.

Of course, there are a lot of template languages out there:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_template_engi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_template_engines)
and I don't know how yours compares to the best of them, but the problem
you're tackling is different from the problem that Markdown is tackling.

Let's not forget all the static site generators:
[http://staticsitegenerators.net/](http://staticsitegenerators.net/)

The main strengths of Markdown are simplicity, readability, and standard
feature set. Markdown is entirely usable without being transformed into HTML.
Plus, the lack of extensibility means that services like GitHub can enable
pretty views of Markdown documents without having to process costly and/or
dangerous user-provided extensions. Once you introduce variables and
calculations and lookups into a DOM, you largely lose all that and you have
something entirely different.

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thinkpad20
The author's complaint that Markdown isn't expressive enough doesn't really
make sense. Expressiveness is most valuable when you need to support a wide
range of functionality. Writing a single page app with extensive javascript
gymnastics, complex layout, etc, is where expressiveness is needed, and, not
coincidentally, it's also not where Markdown is designed to be used. It's
designed for documents which are embedded in web pages, like blog posts or
comments or github READMEs, or whatever. In these cases you're only
(typically) concerned about a very small subset of HTML -- the ability to
italicize, bold, underline, insert code, etc. Markdown's _raison d 'être_, and
the source of its popularity, is that it provides these features with almost
no effort, and often in the most intuitive way possible.

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StephenGL
My objection to Markdown is that its just a proxy for something else and only
fixes a very limited set of HTML issues. If you have to learn Markdown you may
as well learn HTML. The security issues need to have pressure applied to the
browsers to fix.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Markdown requires far less typing than HTML for common use cases.

    
    
        *This is italic.*
        <i>This is italic.</i>
    

or (semantic version):

    
    
        <em>This is italic.</em>
    

The second has three times the markup overhead as the first and the third has
four times the markup overhead. That matters. If you're writing long-form text
it matters _a lot_.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Paragraphs are even worse. In Markdown you just hit return. In HTML you have
to write <p></p> or <p />. That really adds up for a long piece.

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rowanwernham
The great thing about markdown is that it's basically readable as plain text.

So you get something that's easy to write, works with plain text formatting,
and can be viewed with full HTML styling.

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renox
Strange that there isn't a comparison between Pollen and TeX/LateX in the
documentation..

