5 ms·

The Curse of Markdown

130 points by pomber 2y ago

jmartinez27 2y ago
Non-related, but this is the first time I actually like animations that happen while scrolling. I think it has something to do with the fact that I still have control over the scroll on the right.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Yes, this one doesn't hijack the scroll. It just reacts to it, by changing the text formatting. I still didn't like it. But it's undeniably much better than the usual way people animate their sites.
  - verdverm 2y ago
    Having tried out CodeHike, there are a number of configurations or situations where you can get into scrolling and alignment issues
- bluGill 2y ago
  I'd much rather see each individual graph as a picture so I can compare.
canadianwriter 2y ago
I love how this is formatted - reading it in those little blocks with an image to make it more clear. It is a joy to read. The actual point itself is somewhat interesting too. "curse" is a strong word though.
- vekntksijdhric 2y ago
  I hate that I'm forced to scroll just to be able to read something that is already in the screen, but each to its own. the chart is flashy, but pretty meaningless, there is zero value from it and everything looks overcomplicated.
- codegeek 2y ago
  Funny. For me, it is horrible user experience. Don't decide for me. Let me read what's already on screen. I hate scroll jacking of any type.
  - samatman 2y ago
    This isn't scroll jacking, any more than it's "scroll jacking" when there's a header or menu sidebar which doesn't move with the text. Scroll jacking means something specific, like the style which was introduced by NYT and has been imitated badly ever since, where sometimes scrolling triggers animations and then the text gets the scroll back. Here, the main text moves up and down when you scroll, and there's an illustration on the side which changes accordingly. I'm seeing mixed opinions about that stylistic choice here, I don't have a strong one myself. Just that it isn't scroll jacking. It's some other thing.
deleted 2y ago
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idlewords 2y ago
This format—with each paragraph fading as you scroll, and large changing images alongside—is borderline unreadable. Somewhat ironic in a blog post that (I think) is about tradeoffs between text and formatting.
- teddyh 2y ago
  I initially closed the tab immediately, as I assumed that the greyed-out text was indicative of a paywall.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Not happening to me on mobile, weird.
  - afandian 2y ago
    On iPhone as you scroll the page is blank, with paras appearing after a short delay.
- erickhill 2y ago
  It is so unnecessary and distracting. I quit reading after the first scroll as my eyes were pulled away from the text.
  - rhdunn 2y ago
    That's why I hate things like auto-rotating image/news carosels or Windows "live tiles". Having them manually triggered is fine but a) I may be half-way through reading a headline; and b) if I'm reading something off to the side it draws my eye for a moment, disrupting my workflow.
- preommr 2y ago
  This comment made me curious, but I still wasn't ready for how comically bad it is. On my large screen monitor, that single paragraph looks infuriatingly bad. It's so much wasted space that it detracts from anything else.
- 2y ago
seanhunter 2y ago
There's a special circle of hell for places who make "plot-like" illustrations that are supposed to look like data visualisations but are just graphics. It's extremely deceptive. TFA has a bunch of things which look like plots of richness vs cost but are actually just what a statistician would call "totally made-up bullshit"
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  "There is a relation, and it should look like this" is a very common way for people to express themselves. Your way would ban all the engineerings and most of physics from being created.
  - seanhunter 2y ago
    What you're talking about is a sketch, which is totally fine. What this website produces is a thing that is very clearly a facsimile of a plot. It literally has made an attempt to produce points of different sizes etc, to look like a bubble plot but it's not. It's just made up.
  - lgessler 2y ago
    I think GP is saying that just lines on the same plot would have been less deceptive, whereas the plot that is actually there has fake data points. Readers are used to the former being purely imaginative, whereas the latter almost always means there's real measurement involved.
misthop 2y ago
> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive >That sparse area just beyond the limits of Markdown is of vital importance to the web. These websites are not only a joy to read but also the ones that explore the web's possibilities, embracing the medium and evoking a truly web-native feel. >Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them. Interesting to me that you have added "focus on this paragraph" coloring to your site. I'm not against that in principle, but you have placed it farther up the page than I prefer to read and scroll. So you care deeply about my experience, have created a whole tool to inhabit an area of web design that you think is undeserved, rationalize it based on feels, and, for me, deliver a poorer experience to show it off. "The Website Wasteland", as you call it, is a good thing if this is the result of populating it.
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  well put, and I had thoughts just like this while reading the linked article. I find that most of the use cases in that 'wasteland' would be made better by reducing the fluff and focusing on content. In my younger days, I chafed at the restrictions of Markdown and similar tools. However I now appreciate that the results are almost always easier to read.
- josephg 2y ago
  Eh, maybe that's excessive for you and the kind of writing you do. But I think the author is right - there's plenty of valuable writing where being able to customize the page more is valuable. The most obvious example to me is academic articles - where you need footnotes, figures, algorithm blocks, appendicies, math, numbered sections, and so on. Markdown doesn't support any of that stuff and latex is horrible on the web. It would be great to have something with support for those features, but that also supported HTML output. But, there's plenty more examples where being able to make richer content than markdown supports is super valuable. For example, Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog is incredible: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ Doing anything like this in markdown is hard. You're kind of fighting the tool. The ideal tool would support custom components + custom styling - which aren't supported at all by markdown. This whole comment thread is weirdly down on the article. I suspect most people have simply never come up against markdown's limitations while doing technical writing. They're quite severe whenever the output of your documentation needs to be a rich website or paper, not just a documentation file in a github repository.
greggyb 2y ago
The text graying out and scrolling effect leads to overlaps for me. Firefox 133. https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg
gklitz 2y ago
“I have created a tool, and I’m imagining that it’s very important. Just look at this data I made up!” What a joke. I think the author forgot to think about the content and got all invested in the display of their site. Should have just used markdown and spent the saved time looking for actual real data.
deleted 2y ago
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kccqzy 2y ago
Markdown has always supported direct raw HTML in it. I don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost. Don't be a Markdown purist. Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML. He doesn't even do multi-paragraph ordered lists in Markdown, and chooses to write <ol><li><p> instead. And he also uses <a><img> for clickable images. You can append ".text" to any of his blog article to get the Markdown source; example https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_12_pro.text https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_...
- apitman 2y ago
  I wish more sites offered plain text versions. You can read mine with netcat: nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feed
  - djbusby 2y ago
    On HTTP one can use the Accept header to indicate desired response type.
    - apitman 2y ago
      Sadly, content negotiation has fallen out of favor
- aylmao 2y ago
  On the note of embedding HTML in Markdown, I think it'd be cool if it were just as easy to embed Markdown in HTML. Something akin to a <markdown> tag. Markdown makes it easy to write formatted content at the cost of initial compiler setup, HTML is 0-cost setup but takes some effort to write formatted content. With a <markdown> tag one could start with vanilla HTML at zero cost, use all its features straight away, but not have to type HTML for the simple, "content" parts of a site. EDIT: there seem to be web components for this already: - https://github.com/xan105/web-component-markdown https://github.com/xan105/web-component-markdown - https://www.webcomponents.org/element/zero-md https://www.webcomponents.org/element/zero-md - https://www.webcomponents.org/element/@vanillawc/wc-markdown https://www.webcomponents.org/element/@vanillawc/wc-markdown
dialup_sounds 2y ago
> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them. Sir, you've reinvented text with images.
Ayesh 2y ago
Almost all of the blog posts and articles I write nowadays are in Markdown, and it sure is painful sometimes when you need formatting that you just need a liiiitle bit of tweaking to get right. My solution is to fork the markdown tool I use to add my own tweaks. Some of the changes I added are: - Vertical padding: Typically, `---` and `*` get converted to `<hr>` tags. I use `*` for `<hr class="small">` that has different padding top/bottom. - Code examples with syntax highlighting. - Block quotes with class names: `> {.warning}` - Headers and table rows with support for setting a specific anchor ID: `# Header {#myId}` - `<img>` tags with CSS URL matching to apply certain styles. For example, match `<img>` tags URLs ending with `#screenshot` will have drop shadow.
recursive 2y ago
Interesting idea, but it seems to be tied to react, which IMO is too far in the other direction.
w10-1 2y ago
This doesn't back the hypothesis that there are applications (cough opportunities) held back by markdown's deferral of styling. Markdown's chief feature is to be usable without tooling when writing, so more content is generated in the first place. So it extends the rich/cost graph to the left. Because markdown is easily and often parsed, it operates as a data source from the get-go, mostly achieving the separation of concerns needed to scale to the right. What are the pain or price points that will change with adopting this new technology? (Is Swift-docc really the comparable? It seems to show what this is hopefully not: a subset dialect of markdown struggling with volatile, unusable hash links, no real extensibility or inter-op, tethered to BigCo's mission.) (The curse of curses: they provoke negativity.)
thek3nger 2y ago
The fact that this website decided to "fade out" the paragraph at the scrolling level where I usually read is infuriating.
jrm4 2y ago
Is there anything more going on here than "use the right tool for the job?"
djoldman 2y ago
> This jump in cost disrupts the trade-off between richness and effort. For content with a sweet spot just beyond Markdown’s limits, the additional effort often seems too high for the small gain in richness, leading to a preference for staying with Markdown and sacrificing richness. Why is asciidoc not more popular? It seems to support more than markdown and seems straightforward.
- bluGill 2y ago
  asciidoc, restructured text, and there are several others tools that support some more features.
groby_b 2y ago
This would be a much better article if two things changed: One, skip the scroll gimmick. It's a waste of time and space (and that has been discussed enough) Two, give us examples that live in that supposed wasteland. Without those, it looks like you're building a technology in the abstract. And, don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. It so tickles my sense of "fun engineering challenge, great way to express structure". But I've long learned that means it's also very likely in the "overengineered" corner. I share your belief that there's a "there" there. (I'm on my umpteenth iteration of my own personal markdown, so I would ;) I think it'd be helpful to crystallize that into more concrete uses.
sharkjacobs 2y ago
What's an example of a website or feature which needs just a little bit more "richness" than a static website with formatted text and links and images?
- bluGill 2y ago
  Any page that needs a table of contents with links to the sections.
  - bvrmn 2y ago
    Markdown supports TOC. Some flavors at least.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      Unfortunately not the flavor I am using. Or at least it didn't when I got mad enough to switch to restructured text and a more complex build process. Where I've seen a TOC in markdown it was far too much manual effort to maintain the TOC and they tore it out some years back - but maybe better implementations exist today
      - bvrmn 2y ago
        I fill your pain. For example bitbucket has a total garbage instead of proper markdown renderer. No TOC, no stable header links, no navigation to anchors on first page visit, no image scaling. But if you control documentation render process there is a number of feature-rich renderers like pandoc, mkdocs and others.
impure 2y ago
I really like the format. The problem with slideshows is you either have to scroll back and forth or click on the next page buttons. This page fixes both of them. Although I can see how the fading out of the text is a bit annoying. Also is anyone building websites with markdown? I thought it was just a tool to format notes and blog posts. And even then you can insert HTML in it.
hipinspire 2y ago
Check out this format: https://marko.blog https://marko.blog
bee_rider 2y ago
> A great example of a rich content website is the Tailwind CSS landing page. This is a pretty bad example, right? It is the landing page for some web framework or whatever, that shows you it can make over-complicated websites by being itself an over-complicated website. It is being good at its job in some sense no matter what it does, because the thing it is showing is… the thing that it does. But, this doesn’t show any evidence that any other websites need to be as interactive and dynamic as the tailwind website (they don’t). Websites are all over-complicated, markdown is no curse. If this wall is true, it is a blessed line of defense.
- benj111 2y ago
  Yes, it is a bit bizarre. The authors solution is more frame works to bridge the gap, but the only evidence for something beyond that gap is itself a framework. Doubly troubling is that theyre pushing their own frame work, that presumably they think solves some real world problem, but can point to a concrete example of what theyre solving. Finally. If you want to foist a complicated website on a user, you can't complain about complexity in the creation of the site. Quite why a dev feels the need to push a framework, to make a fancy site, just for me to install an ad blocker to remove the fancy (I assume thats what were really talking about here) to get back to markdown levels. I don't know.
- gherkinnn 2y ago
  Tailwind is a styling system. And it makes sense that its website shows off what it can do. It has nothing to do with complicated.
- agnishom 2y ago
  That made me chuckle. It is like showing how good my programming language by building an interpreter.
flkiwi 2y ago
> Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them. The premise is deeply flawed. Richness is not a sign of care or investment in the reader's experience. Often it's exactly the opposite. Often richness is gaudy and pointless while simplicity makes content clearer and more useful. Maybe this is a great and valuable tool for certain use cases, but the justification here is weak.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  Yup, the author's website is an example of this. Their flashy graphic that animated while scrolling did nothing for the content. In fact, their font was so small I could not read the text without zooming in, which completely contradicts the whole premise of the piece -- that a lack of "richness" is preventing ideas from being communicated. If richness prevents your ideas from being transmitted outright, then what's the point? If the author had used Markdown their idea would have been better communicated, but I guess that also would have contradicted it.
liendolucas 2y ago
Meh. An overengineered article about markdown. I stopped reading after: "Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web". MD is a tool, just as any other tool after becoming familiar with it, you know in advance if it's going to serve you well or not and of its potential limitations. I keep all valuable personal notes on a local Hugo which is basically all markdown and I wouldn't have this if I had to write things down myself in any other format. So no, is not a curse at all but a timer saver for me it is.
jfax 2y ago
The first example website given here is described "just text with minimal styling." It's not just text though, it's hypertext? Since when did everyone lose sight of what hypertext is.
tristor 2y ago
This entire argument is weird. My website is relatively rich in content, in different contexts, including (now out of date/deprecated) interactive tutorials. Every single thing on my website is statically generated from Markdown. Nothing about richness or leanness is implied or enforced by using Markdown for text, it's about everything else around it. On a statically generated page, you do it in Javascript, and render client-side if needed w/ data prepopulated in static objects. The only thing you can't do with a static page that ingests text as RST or Markdown or any other markup language, is something that requires dynamism with a backend database. This is trying to blame Markdown and statically generated sites for leanness, but minimalism is a stylistic aesthetic choice people made that was a trend for awhile, it's not a requirement of the technology. The technology is just a tool.
lgessler 2y ago
Extended (or rather, distended) Markdown flavors always make me queasy, and I don't love the snippet from Code Hike. In my mind, Markdown is fundamentally intended to be lightweight--something for a Reddit post or a blog comment. Heavily extending its syntax instead of choosing a saner syntactic basis strikes me as ill-advised. But one can't deny the advantages for adoption to be had from using Markdown as a starting point, and the project appears to be very popular, so perhaps worse is better.
danbee 2y ago
We already have a markup language capable of this. It's called HTML.
bvrmn 2y ago
> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them. IMHO article would be much better while not exploring new ideas and use simple text and web-native controls instead of inconvenient accessibility-wise poor UI/UX. P.S. Print preview is hilariously bad.
quuxplusone 2y ago
From TFA: > The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) Perhaps the author's thesis is wrong.
smcleod 2y ago
Opened this site to find the readable text was squashed into the middle maybe 10% of my screen, as much as markdown can be annoying - websites that refuse to use a reasonable portion of the browser width for readable content annoying me far more.
darkteflon 2y ago
I used to feel bad about trying to shoehorn markdown into places it clearly wasn’t suited, but Quarto put an end to those concerns. It makes damn near anything possible thanks to Pandoc, and sure beats the mish-mash of various single-purpose tooling I used to use for presentations, memoranda, static site generation, documentation, etc.
0xbadcafebee 2y ago
Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown. There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold. They don't want to write code. They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day. We have had programs that do this for about 40+ years now. They are called word processors and presentation tools. They work very well, and require absolutely zero code or weird characters. But software engineers are so insanely out of touch, so cluelessly locked into their web browsers, that they literally cannot imagine a universe in which a person isn't writing code to get some text to show up on a screen, formatted and laid out. It literally feels like everyone in this industry is insane.
- herpdyderp 2y ago
  > They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day. This is exactly why I ditched WYSIWYG long before I knew how to code.
- usr1106 2y ago
  Everyone and that even includes many software developers uses unprofessional tools. Wysiwyg and pressing buttons are easier when you start. Text-only sources and mark up (like Markdown...) are more powerful when requirements grow. Just as an example: We use Google's office suite in our company because there are some users who believe it is more user-friendly than storing text and a proper version control. For version control Google offers named versions. Last week some Google sheet reached its 16th version. Well, would have reached, if Google did not limit the number of named versions to 15. You cannot run a business with serious audit trail requirements using so-called user-friendly "everyone uses" tools. Everyone has horrible standards and inappropriate IT continues to lower them. It's a fact, but not a fact anyone should praise.
- rr808 2y ago
  I think this is because normal people dont use git and/or console text editors. Its a powerful combination that makes markdown useful.
jmull 2y ago
> Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web The problem is made-up, too, based on the author’s (incorrect) perception of markdown. You can start dropping in as much or as little HTML as you want.
WalterBright 2y ago
I used RUNOFF back in the 1970s. I used it for writing papers. Things haven't evolved much beyond it.
agnishom 2y ago
I am not sure Markdown is a curse because of the gap that it creates in the chart. But I agree with one thing: we do need to explore interesting DSLs for producing beautiful documents.
vitiral 2y ago
I think markdown is poorly designed, especially in terms of ease of parsing (human AND machine!) I've written my own markup language, I'd love ANYONE'S feedback, either good or bad https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Why did you make the decisions you did? My very first impression was “this looks different from Markdown for the sake of being different”. You say yours is easier to parse. Can you give some examples of when that might be try? Things like [*bold text] seem like they’d be harder to parse. (It’s hard to communicate tone here. My intent above was to sound curious, not dismissive.)
  - vitiral 2y ago
    The bulk parser only needs to read a single character and only needs to care about two characters (brackets). The sub parser then looks for either {...} or a single character. Markdown requires all sorts of complexity and it's nearly undecideable. Before CommonMark there wasn't even a spec and many things were largely ambiguous. Also, tables and other structured data in markdown are almost entirely hacks
trescenzi 2y ago
A fun example that shows how interactivity isn’t necessarily the best thing to judge richness by is Janet for Mortals which is 100% html and likely markdown but also embeds the Janet interpreter so you can use the language as you learn it. https://janet.guide/ https://janet.guide/

130 points by pomber 2y ago

Non-related, but this is the first time I actually like animations that happen while scrolling. I think it has something to do with the fact that I still have control over the scroll on the right.

marcosdumay 2y ago
Yes, this one doesn't hijack the scroll. It just reacts to it, by changing the text formatting. I still didn't like it. But it's undeniably much better than the usual way people animate their sites.
- verdverm 2y ago
  Having tried out CodeHike, there are a number of configurations or situations where you can get into scrolling and alignment issues
bluGill 2y ago
I'd much rather see each individual graph as a picture so I can compare.

canadianwriter 2y ago

I love how this is formatted - reading it in those little blocks with an image to make it more clear. It is a joy to read. The actual point itself is somewhat interesting too. "curse" is a strong word though.

vekntksijdhric 2y ago
I hate that I'm forced to scroll just to be able to read something that is already in the screen, but each to its own. the chart is flashy, but pretty meaningless, there is zero value from it and everything looks overcomplicated.
codegeek 2y ago
Funny. For me, it is horrible user experience. Don't decide for me. Let me read what's already on screen. I hate scroll jacking of any type.
- samatman 2y ago
  This isn't scroll jacking, any more than it's "scroll jacking" when there's a header or menu sidebar which doesn't move with the text. Scroll jacking means something specific, like the style which was introduced by NYT and has been imitated badly ever since, where sometimes scrolling triggers animations and then the text gets the scroll back. Here, the main text moves up and down when you scroll, and there's an illustration on the side which changes accordingly. I'm seeing mixed opinions about that stylistic choice here, I don't have a strong one myself. Just that it isn't scroll jacking. It's some other thing.

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idlewords 2y ago

This format—with each paragraph fading as you scroll, and large changing images alongside—is borderline unreadable. Somewhat ironic in a blog post that (I think) is about tradeoffs between text and formatting.

teddyh 2y ago
I initially closed the tab immediately, as I assumed that the greyed-out text was indicative of a paywall.
xandrius 2y ago
Not happening to me on mobile, weird.
- afandian 2y ago
  On iPhone as you scroll the page is blank, with paras appearing after a short delay.
erickhill 2y ago
It is so unnecessary and distracting. I quit reading after the first scroll as my eyes were pulled away from the text.
- rhdunn 2y ago
  That's why I hate things like auto-rotating image/news carosels or Windows "live tiles". Having them manually triggered is fine but a) I may be half-way through reading a headline; and b) if I'm reading something off to the side it draws my eye for a moment, disrupting my workflow.
preommr 2y ago
This comment made me curious, but I still wasn't ready for how comically bad it is. On my large screen monitor, that single paragraph looks infuriatingly bad. It's so much wasted space that it detracts from anything else.
2y ago

seanhunter 2y ago

There's a special circle of hell for places who make "plot-like" illustrations that are supposed to look like data visualisations but are just graphics. It's extremely deceptive. TFA has a bunch of things which look like plots of richness vs cost but are actually just what a statistician would call "totally made-up bullshit"

marcosdumay 2y ago
"There is a relation, and it should look like this" is a very common way for people to express themselves. Your way would ban all the engineerings and most of physics from being created.
- seanhunter 2y ago
  What you're talking about is a sketch, which is totally fine. What this website produces is a thing that is very clearly a facsimile of a plot. It literally has made an attempt to produce points of different sizes etc, to look like a bubble plot but it's not. It's just made up.
- lgessler 2y ago
  I think GP is saying that just lines on the same plot would have been less deceptive, whereas the plot that is actually there has fake data points. Readers are used to the former being purely imaginative, whereas the latter almost always means there's real measurement involved.

misthop 2y ago

> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive >That sparse area just beyond the limits of Markdown is of vital importance to the web. These websites are not only a joy to read but also the ones that explore the web's possibilities, embracing the medium and evoking a truly web-native feel. >Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them. Interesting to me that you have added "focus on this paragraph" coloring to your site. I'm not against that in principle, but you have placed it farther up the page than I prefer to read and scroll. So you care deeply about my experience, have created a whole tool to inhabit an area of web design that you think is undeserved, rationalize it based on feels, and, for me, deliver a poorer experience to show it off. "The Website Wasteland", as you call it, is a good thing if this is the result of populating it.

metalliqaz 2y ago
well put, and I had thoughts just like this while reading the linked article. I find that most of the use cases in that 'wasteland' would be made better by reducing the fluff and focusing on content. In my younger days, I chafed at the restrictions of Markdown and similar tools. However I now appreciate that the results are almost always easier to read.
josephg 2y ago
Eh, maybe that's excessive for you and the kind of writing you do. But I think the author is right - there's plenty of valuable writing where being able to customize the page more is valuable. The most obvious example to me is academic articles - where you need footnotes, figures, algorithm blocks, appendicies, math, numbered sections, and so on. Markdown doesn't support any of that stuff and latex is horrible on the web. It would be great to have something with support for those features, but that also supported HTML output. But, there's plenty more examples where being able to make richer content than markdown supports is super valuable. For example, Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog is incredible: https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ https://ciechanow.ski/gps/ Doing anything like this in markdown is hard. You're kind of fighting the tool. The ideal tool would support custom components + custom styling - which aren't supported at all by markdown. This whole comment thread is weirdly down on the article. I suspect most people have simply never come up against markdown's limitations while doing technical writing. They're quite severe whenever the output of your documentation needs to be a rich website or paper, not just a documentation file in a github repository.

greggyb 2y ago

The text graying out and scrolling effect leads to overlaps for me. Firefox 133. https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg

gklitz 2y ago

“I have created a tool, and I’m imagining that it’s very important. Just look at this data I made up!” What a joke. I think the author forgot to think about the content and got all invested in the display of their site. Should have just used markdown and spent the saved time looking for actual real data.

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kccqzy 2y ago

Markdown has always supported direct raw HTML in it. I don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost. Don't be a Markdown purist. Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML. He doesn't even do multi-paragraph ordered lists in Markdown, and chooses to write <ol><li><p> instead. And he also uses <a><img> for clickable images. You can append ".text" to any of his blog article to get the Markdown source; example https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_12_pro.text https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_...

apitman 2y ago
I wish more sites offered plain text versions. You can read mine with netcat: nc apitman.com 2052 <<< /txt/feed
- djbusby 2y ago
  On HTTP one can use the Accept header to indicate desired response type.
  - apitman 2y ago
    Sadly, content negotiation has fallen out of favor
aylmao 2y ago
On the note of embedding HTML in Markdown, I think it'd be cool if it were just as easy to embed Markdown in HTML. Something akin to a <markdown> tag. Markdown makes it easy to write formatted content at the cost of initial compiler setup, HTML is 0-cost setup but takes some effort to write formatted content. With a <markdown> tag one could start with vanilla HTML at zero cost, use all its features straight away, but not have to type HTML for the simple, "content" parts of a site. EDIT: there seem to be web components for this already: - https://github.com/xan105/web-component-markdown https://github.com/xan105/web-component-markdown - https://www.webcomponents.org/element/zero-md https://www.webcomponents.org/element/zero-md - https://www.webcomponents.org/element/@vanillawc/wc-markdown https://www.webcomponents.org/element/@vanillawc/wc-markdown

dialup_sounds 2y ago

> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them. Sir, you've reinvented text with images.

Ayesh 2y ago

Almost all of the blog posts and articles I write nowadays are in Markdown, and it sure is painful sometimes when you need formatting that you just need a liiiitle bit of tweaking to get right. My solution is to fork the markdown tool I use to add my own tweaks. Some of the changes I added are: - Vertical padding: Typically, `---` and `*` get converted to `<hr>` tags. I use `*` for `<hr class="small">` that has different padding top/bottom. - Code examples with syntax highlighting. - Block quotes with class names: `> {.warning}` - Headers and table rows with support for setting a specific anchor ID: `# Header {#myId}` - `<img>` tags with CSS URL matching to apply certain styles. For example, match `<img>` tags URLs ending with `#screenshot` will have drop shadow.

recursive 2y ago

Interesting idea, but it seems to be tied to react, which IMO is too far in the other direction.

w10-1 2y ago

This doesn't back the hypothesis that there are applications (cough opportunities) held back by markdown's deferral of styling. Markdown's chief feature is to be usable without tooling when writing, so more content is generated in the first place. So it extends the rich/cost graph to the left. Because markdown is easily and often parsed, it operates as a data source from the get-go, mostly achieving the separation of concerns needed to scale to the right. What are the pain or price points that will change with adopting this new technology? (Is Swift-docc really the comparable? It seems to show what this is hopefully not: a subset dialect of markdown struggling with volatile, unusable hash links, no real extensibility or inter-op, tethered to BigCo's mission.) (The curse of curses: they provoke negativity.)

thek3nger 2y ago

The fact that this website decided to "fade out" the paragraph at the scrolling level where I usually read is infuriating.

jrm4 2y ago

Is there anything more going on here than "use the right tool for the job?"

djoldman 2y ago

> This jump in cost disrupts the trade-off between richness and effort. For content with a sweet spot just beyond Markdown’s limits, the additional effort often seems too high for the small gain in richness, leading to a preference for staying with Markdown and sacrificing richness. Why is asciidoc not more popular? It seems to support more than markdown and seems straightforward.

bluGill 2y ago
asciidoc, restructured text, and there are several others tools that support some more features.

groby_b 2y ago

This would be a much better article if two things changed: One, skip the scroll gimmick. It's a waste of time and space (and that has been discussed enough) Two, give us examples that live in that supposed wasteland. Without those, it looks like you're building a technology in the abstract. And, don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. It so tickles my sense of "fun engineering challenge, great way to express structure". But I've long learned that means it's also very likely in the "overengineered" corner. I share your belief that there's a "there" there. (I'm on my umpteenth iteration of my own personal markdown, so I would ;) I think it'd be helpful to crystallize that into more concrete uses.

sharkjacobs 2y ago

What's an example of a website or feature which needs just a little bit more "richness" than a static website with formatted text and links and images?

bluGill 2y ago
Any page that needs a table of contents with links to the sections.
- bvrmn 2y ago
  Markdown supports TOC. Some flavors at least.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Unfortunately not the flavor I am using. Or at least it didn't when I got mad enough to switch to restructured text and a more complex build process. Where I've seen a TOC in markdown it was far too much manual effort to maintain the TOC and they tore it out some years back - but maybe better implementations exist today
    - bvrmn 2y ago
      I fill your pain. For example bitbucket has a total garbage instead of proper markdown renderer. No TOC, no stable header links, no navigation to anchors on first page visit, no image scaling. But if you control documentation render process there is a number of feature-rich renderers like pandoc, mkdocs and others.

impure 2y ago

I really like the format. The problem with slideshows is you either have to scroll back and forth or click on the next page buttons. This page fixes both of them. Although I can see how the fading out of the text is a bit annoying. Also is anyone building websites with markdown? I thought it was just a tool to format notes and blog posts. And even then you can insert HTML in it.

hipinspire 2y ago

Check out this format: https://marko.blog https://marko.blog

bee_rider 2y ago

> A great example of a rich content website is the Tailwind CSS landing page. This is a pretty bad example, right? It is the landing page for some web framework or whatever, that shows you it can make over-complicated websites by being itself an over-complicated website. It is being good at its job in some sense no matter what it does, because the thing it is showing is… the thing that it does. But, this doesn’t show any evidence that any other websites need to be as interactive and dynamic as the tailwind website (they don’t). Websites are all over-complicated, markdown is no curse. If this wall is true, it is a blessed line of defense.

benj111 2y ago
Yes, it is a bit bizarre. The authors solution is more frame works to bridge the gap, but the only evidence for something beyond that gap is itself a framework. Doubly troubling is that theyre pushing their own frame work, that presumably they think solves some real world problem, but can point to a concrete example of what theyre solving. Finally. If you want to foist a complicated website on a user, you can't complain about complexity in the creation of the site. Quite why a dev feels the need to push a framework, to make a fancy site, just for me to install an ad blocker to remove the fancy (I assume thats what were really talking about here) to get back to markdown levels. I don't know.
gherkinnn 2y ago
Tailwind is a styling system. And it makes sense that its website shows off what it can do. It has nothing to do with complicated.
agnishom 2y ago
That made me chuckle. It is like showing how good my programming language by building an interpreter.

flkiwi 2y ago

> Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them. The premise is deeply flawed. Richness is not a sign of care or investment in the reader's experience. Often it's exactly the opposite. Often richness is gaudy and pointless while simplicity makes content clearer and more useful. Maybe this is a great and valuable tool for certain use cases, but the justification here is weak.

ModernMech 2y ago
Yup, the author's website is an example of this. Their flashy graphic that animated while scrolling did nothing for the content. In fact, their font was so small I could not read the text without zooming in, which completely contradicts the whole premise of the piece -- that a lack of "richness" is preventing ideas from being communicated. If richness prevents your ideas from being transmitted outright, then what's the point? If the author had used Markdown their idea would have been better communicated, but I guess that also would have contradicted it.

liendolucas 2y ago

Meh. An overengineered article about markdown. I stopped reading after: "Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web". MD is a tool, just as any other tool after becoming familiar with it, you know in advance if it's going to serve you well or not and of its potential limitations. I keep all valuable personal notes on a local Hugo which is basically all markdown and I wouldn't have this if I had to write things down myself in any other format. So no, is not a curse at all but a timer saver for me it is.

jfax 2y ago

The first example website given here is described "just text with minimal styling." It's not just text though, it's hypertext? Since when did everyone lose sight of what hypertext is.

tristor 2y ago

This entire argument is weird. My website is relatively rich in content, in different contexts, including (now out of date/deprecated) interactive tutorials. Every single thing on my website is statically generated from Markdown. Nothing about richness or leanness is implied or enforced by using Markdown for text, it's about everything else around it. On a statically generated page, you do it in Javascript, and render client-side if needed w/ data prepopulated in static objects. The only thing you can't do with a static page that ingests text as RST or Markdown or any other markup language, is something that requires dynamism with a backend database. This is trying to blame Markdown and statically generated sites for leanness, but minimalism is a stylistic aesthetic choice people made that was a trend for awhile, it's not a requirement of the technology. The technology is just a tool.

lgessler 2y ago

Extended (or rather, distended) Markdown flavors always make me queasy, and I don't love the snippet from Code Hike. In my mind, Markdown is fundamentally intended to be lightweight--something for a Reddit post or a blog comment. Heavily extending its syntax instead of choosing a saner syntactic basis strikes me as ill-advised. But one can't deny the advantages for adoption to be had from using Markdown as a starting point, and the project appears to be very popular, so perhaps worse is better.

danbee 2y ago

We already have a markup language capable of this. It's called HTML.

bvrmn 2y ago

> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them. IMHO article would be much better while not exploring new ideas and use simple text and web-native controls instead of inconvenient accessibility-wise poor UI/UX. P.S. Print preview is hilariously bad.

quuxplusone 2y ago

From TFA: > The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web) Perhaps the author's thesis is wrong.

smcleod 2y ago

Opened this site to find the readable text was squashed into the middle maybe 10% of my screen, as much as markdown can be annoying - websites that refuse to use a reasonable portion of the browser width for readable content annoying me far more.

darkteflon 2y ago

I used to feel bad about trying to shoehorn markdown into places it clearly wasn’t suited, but Quarto put an end to those concerns. It makes damn near anything possible thanks to Pandoc, and sure beats the mish-mash of various single-purpose tooling I used to use for presentations, memoranda, static site generation, documentation, etc.

0xbadcafebee 2y ago

Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - does not use Markdown. There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses. It's because normal people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format. They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold. They don't want to write code. They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day. We have had programs that do this for about 40+ years now. They are called word processors and presentation tools. They work very well, and require absolutely zero code or weird characters. But software engineers are so insanely out of touch, so cluelessly locked into their web browsers, that they literally cannot imagine a universe in which a person isn't writing code to get some text to show up on a screen, formatted and laid out. It literally feels like everyone in this industry is insane.

herpdyderp 2y ago
> They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day. This is exactly why I ditched WYSIWYG long before I knew how to code.
usr1106 2y ago
Everyone and that even includes many software developers uses unprofessional tools. Wysiwyg and pressing buttons are easier when you start. Text-only sources and mark up (like Markdown...) are more powerful when requirements grow. Just as an example: We use Google's office suite in our company because there are some users who believe it is more user-friendly than storing text and a proper version control. For version control Google offers named versions. Last week some Google sheet reached its 16th version. Well, would have reached, if Google did not limit the number of named versions to 15. You cannot run a business with serious audit trail requirements using so-called user-friendly "everyone uses" tools. Everyone has horrible standards and inappropriate IT continues to lower them. It's a fact, but not a fact anyone should praise.
rr808 2y ago
I think this is because normal people dont use git and/or console text editors. Its a powerful combination that makes markdown useful.

jmull 2y ago

> Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web The problem is made-up, too, based on the author’s (incorrect) perception of markdown. You can start dropping in as much or as little HTML as you want.

WalterBright 2y ago

I used RUNOFF back in the 1970s. I used it for writing papers. Things haven't evolved much beyond it.

agnishom 2y ago

I am not sure Markdown is a curse because of the gap that it creates in the chart. But I agree with one thing: we do need to explore interesting DSLs for producing beautiful documents.

vitiral 2y ago

I think markdown is poorly designed, especially in terms of ease of parsing (human AND machine!) I've written my own markup language, I'd love ANYONE'S feedback, either good or bad https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt

kstrauser 2y ago
Why did you make the decisions you did? My very first impression was “this looks different from Markdown for the sake of being different”. You say yours is easier to parse. Can you give some examples of when that might be try? Things like [*bold text] seem like they’d be harder to parse. (It’s hard to communicate tone here. My intent above was to sound curious, not dismissive.)
- vitiral 2y ago
  The bulk parser only needs to read a single character and only needs to care about two characters (brackets). The sub parser then looks for either {...} or a single character. Markdown requires all sorts of complexity and it's nearly undecideable. Before CommonMark there wasn't even a spec and many things were largely ambiguous. Also, tables and other structured data in markdown are almost entirely hacks

trescenzi 2y ago

A fun example that shows how interactivity isn’t necessarily the best thing to judge richness by is Janet for Mortals which is 100% html and likely markdown but also embeds the Janet interpreter so you can use the language as you learn it. https://janet.guide/ https://janet.guide/