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When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there'
by dotdi 1y ago
When Gruber mentions that he never uses Markdown outside of his blog, and hinting at the fact that it was not intended for text editors (and other apps), there's one important point I want to make.
Yes, Markdown has disadvantages, and a few rough edges for uses as the format for editors et al, but there are two very big advantages and/or sideffects of it's widespread use: (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Even in open-source apps, proprietary formats make it hard for non-dev users to get their stuff out. If it's markdown (or at least supports markdown export) from the beginning, at least you know you can take your data with you.
- empath75 1y agoIt's also great for writing documentation in a plaintext IDE, which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption.
- diggan 1y ago> which I think is what _really_ drove a lot of the adoption That GitHub used it as a "native" format everywhere from the beginning (as far as I remember), probably helped Markdown become at least as popular (or maybe even more) as GitHub itself. Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs, and since people already wrote their READMEs and issue comments with Markdown, I guess it was natural to want to write your blogposts with Markdown too, just like Gruber.
- bsimpson 1y agoDon't overlook Reddit as a major reason for many otherwise-non-technical people to learn Markdown.
- OJFord 1y agoIt is funny to occasionally see it explained like 'on Reddit you can use ...' and think '..dude, markdown, just tell them you can use markdown' (and then realise oh right yeah ok, your way is probably clearer to them and you probably don't know it as 'markdown' either).
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoReddit's Markdown flavor is a bit weird though. It got closer to CommonMark with New Reddit, but the rest of the UI got worse, and people using Old Reddit don't get the formatting the new version supports, so things like code blocks are often broken.
- chrismorgan 1y agoOriginal Markdown didn’t have fenced code blocks either.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoYes, Old Reddit Markdown is much closer to original Markdown than to CommonMark. New Reddit Markdown is closer to CommonMark.
- presbyterian 1y agoAnd Discord as well. Every young person is on Discord, they're all learning some Markdown
- ummonk 1y agoTeams and Slack as well, though they use an odd variant markdown (where single asterisk indicates bold instead of italics).
- bsimpson 1y agoI get bold and italic confused because Google Chat is almost-Markdown except for * being bold and _ being italic (whereas it's double vs singular in classic Markdown).
- cheema33 1y agoTeams does not use Markdown AFAIK. I wish it did.
- ummonk 1y agoSee https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-markdown-formatting-in-microsoft-teams-4d10bd65-55e2-4b2d-a1f3-2bebdcd2c772 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-markdown-form... My company is on Teams and I regularly use Markdown in my messages, though I still struggle to remember that I have to use underscores not asterisks for italics.
- chrismorgan 1y agoWhat things like Slack and WhatsApp use are not variants of Markdown, but entirely unrelated lightweight markup languages <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language>. As for Teams, it looks like it’s much closer to Markdown (uses the same idiosyncratic/stupid link syntax), but still significantly incompatible even if they call it that. And my guess (as a non-user) is that it’s just an input method immediately converted to HTML or similar, not retained as text. So in that way it’s not Markdown either.
- minimaxir 1y ago> Then everyone and their mother started doing static blogs It helps that Jekyll, one such static blog, was also pushed by GitHub back in the day.
- lblume 1y agoWas Jekyll ever that popular though?
- johannes1234321 1y agoIt certainly populated the "Mark Town to static HTML" blogging approach and created the room for its successors.
- nirvdrum 1y agoI can’t provide usage numbers, but it used to be the happy path for using GitHub Pages. I suppose static site generation was fairly niche so “popular” may not be the right word. I think Jekyll was a big fish in a little pond, however.
- EasyMark 1y agoIt's simple but has good enough capabilities and it's available in a universal format (plain text) that will never expire or get sold or become inaccessible
- Spooky23 1y agoMarkdown is like the new WordPerfect for some people, who want expressive written paths to format text. Like with WordPerfect, there are people who get great utility (attorneys in WP, developers with Markdown), but 80-95% of people don’t get anything out of it. It’s also one of those things where the constraints are an advantage. Markdown is great for internet facing text content, while many aspects of the mainstream wysiwyg editors are really descended from solutions for placing text on paper.
- bombcar 1y agoThose 80% sometimes DO get something out of it - when the resident nerd can fix their broken document because it’s Markdown or WordPerfect. Just because I can’t fix my car doesn’t mean I want an unfixable car.
- Spooky23 1y agoAgreed, but that’s the tension. There’s no free lunch. On the flip, that user wants the complex features of the platform, and exposing them to a markup language takes elegant markdown and turns it into html or ooxml.
- deafpolygon 1y ago[flagged]
- Spooky23 1y agolol. I’m not sure if that’s an insult or a compliment. I use message boards to blow off steam, and have never used any LLM to write anything. Genius or idiot, purely organic writing. :)
- jjani 1y agoIt reads nothing like ChatGPT, the "on the flip" is a dead giveaway that it isn't. Strange comment.
- 1y ago
- eviks 1y ago1. That's solved via readily available exports, so no need to pay the markup price 2. Same thing + other open formats exist
- eduction 1y agoMany formats these days are cleartext. Microsoft Office documents and LibreOffice documents, to name two collections of formats, are both xml based. Not to mention HTML, Latex - the list is long. Markdown is fine but overused, to the point where even the creator is now warning it’s not for everything.
- neilv 1y agoAgreed. For me, the popularity of Markdown on (pre-Microsoft) GitHub and GitLab was all I needed, to declare that the company wiki, code-embedded API docs, and anything else appropriate should just use Markdown. Markdown is good enough for most of the documentation that software engineers do (other than diagrams), they already have to know it, and I don't want yet-another-markup-language to be a barrier to capturing and communicating institutional knowledge. I also tell people that, if you're new to Markdown, even a plain text approximation that doesn't quite format correctly is strongly encouraged, so long as they capture the info somewhere accessible. I'll even offer to cheerfully fix the missing/bad Markdown, so that we have working docs and people can learn the very few parts of Markdown they missed; it's really not much. (I personally have heavily used many much-much better technical documentation systems, and helped develop a WYSIWYG-ish SGML-based one professionally, but just using Markdown is a no-brainer right now. There are much more important things I want people learning and doing, than N different ways of minimally formatting documentation in N different places.)
- 1bpp 1y agoIs there a reason you specify pre-Microsoft GitHub?
- jve 1y ago> other than diagrams Works fine with some help https://mermaid.live/ https://mermaid.live/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams-markdown-files-mermaid/ https://github.blog/developer-skills/github/include-diagrams...
- haiku2077 1y agoNo, mermaid is not fine. You don't have fine control over layout and composition, you can't place your own media and annotations where you like, you can't even use the correct icons for things like databases and cloud services. I usually go into Figma for anything more complex than about 7 entities or if I need to tell a story with composition.
- 1y ago
- addicted 1y agoAnother nice thing about markdown is that you can pick up the formatting even if reading the markdown in plaintext. So lists look exactly how you would expect lists to look like if you were writing it on a piece of paper. Italic/Bolds are surrounded by /* which convey emphasis even in plaintext. Headings prefixed by # is a reasonable way to depict headings in plaintext and convey the intention immediately even if you don't know Markdown.
- EasyMark 1y agoI love the relative simplicity of core markdown with if I need to get fancy to add some html (which is rare) and it works so well in programs like Joplin, rather than fighting weird formatting in programs like OneNote and EverNote
- Xeoncross 1y agoMarkdown was here before the other (currently) big formats and will be here after them. It's not perfect, but at least I don't need to worry about it disappearing on me like every other piece of tech and software I own.
- throw0101c 1y ago> (1) it's cleartext and therefore very good as a measure against vendor lock-in and (2) it has, to some extent, dampened the rampant "not-invented-here"-esqe tendency to use proprietary formats. Also covered by AsciiDoc. "Compare AsciiDoc and Markdown": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27744509 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27744509