Comment by NelsonMinar

2 days ago

I think it's a littly funny he characterizes "Had the right flavor for every different context" as an advantage. It drives me crazy that Markdown is not the same everywhere and I'm still regularly getting confused about *bold* or **bold** or *italics*. (Curse you, Slack's weirdo version.)

I respect Anil's argument that the extensibility has helped it be adapted to different contexts, and in practice the looseness of it doesn't cause a problem. I do wish CommonMark had more traction (and acceptance and use of the name Markdown). It'd be nice to have a standard, at least for the basic stuff.

12 comments

NelsonMinar

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mlok  2 days ago

A more intuitive norm, used in other formats, would have been :

*bold*

/italics/

_underline_

  • lelanthran  2 days ago

    That's exactly what we used in on usenet (except,without rendering unless you were using a nice GUI reader, not just tin/rtin)

    The problem is that that's too many characters to reserve (they all have to be escaped when you want the actual character) making the resulting text look awful in plain text mode.

    • mlok  1 day ago

      They are not reserved characters. They only express a special format when used in that way : a space on its left, and a character stuck to its right AND somewhere down the road : its twin with a character stuck to its left and a space on its right. I built an editor doing just that more than two decades ago, and it works fine.

      So *this* and /that/ express formatting, but not 4 * 5 nor 4*5 nor 4/5 nor m/s.

  • adityaathalye  2 days ago 

      +strikeout+

  ~code/monospace~

  _subscript

  * Heading
  ** Heading 2
  ** Heading 3
     - bullet
     - [1/2] checklist summary
       - [ ] unchecked item
       - [X] checked item

    And so much more...

    I see you, mlok, you fellow person of culture :)

    • NooneAtAll3  1 day ago

      no-no-no

      -strikeout-

      `code`

      and bloody leave "-" as a dash. I so hate that it gets transformed into a dot for "bullet enthusiasts"

duskwuff  2 days ago

In the contexts where Markdown is most often used, the distinction between bold and italics isn't really important. So long as *this* or **this** gets rendered in a way that conveys emphasis, the meaning is preserved.

  • ggm  2 days ago

    The implicit humour of using 3 forms of intent, only one of which works in HN

amazingman  2 days ago

Single-asterisk for bold is not Markdown. I believe Slack calls their thing "markup". I also find it annoying. So annoying that I just learned Slack's keyboard shortcuts instead.

anildash  2 days ago

It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good coder. But the years since then have made me a lot more amenable to what I think of as a sort of Practical Postelism, which I guess is like applied worse-is-better, where we realize the reality is that we'll _always_ have forks and multiplicities, so we should see it as a feature instead of a bug. It's like accepting that hardware will fail, and building it into the system.

I mean, HTML itself is well specified in the streets, and infinitely different flavors in the sheets. I don't _like_ that, the part of me that writes code _hates_ that. But the part of me that wants systems to succeed just had to sort of respect it.

  • adityaathalye  2 days ago

    Ah, Anil, but have you fought the plaintext syntax wars yet?

    Jokes apart, regular, standardised, visually-suggestive syntax is a key reason I've stuck with org-mode despite its limited acceptance in the world at large.

    The many flavours of markdown make it /less/ portable than org syntax, in my experience. As the post below says, "Pandoc lists six different Markdown flavors as output formats." This is not great for collaboration --- now we need some sort of middleware or advanced editor to help people work with more than one syntax format. Besides, mixing syntax in the same document is a boo-boo, because parsers only work at file-level, not semantic token level.

    Owing to this, at times, I go as far as to /author in orgmode, but share in markdown/ (org-export), and slurp back and forth (tangle / detangle).

    Cue:

    Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text: https://karl-voit.at/2017/09/23/orgmode-as-markup-only/