Markdown Is a Disaster: Why and What to Do Instead

13 pointsposted a month ago
by todsacerdoti
(karl-voit.at)

5 Comments

dtagames

a month ago

MD won because it's HTML in a short form and HTML already won because of the web. The adoption of MD as the primary format that LLMs use to read and write doc just sealed the deal. It's a classic case of "worse is better."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

KarlVoit

17 days ago

I beg to differ.

MD did not "win". That would imply that no alternative situation would be possible any more. It's just the most popular Lightweight Markup Language (LML) at the moment. And I do think that it's worth challenging for very good reasons I tried to summarize in my article. (You may want to re-read the section where I mention that most LML users are not even born yet.)

Your argument "it's HTML in a short form and HTML" is not specific to MD. This is true for all LMLs. Therefore, it can't be the reason for MD. Most people making statements like that have never ever used other LMLs and think that MD is the only LML out there. I agree, that LMLs are a very good idea. However, that doesn't imply that workflows need to stick with one of the worst LMLs you can use.

"Worse is Better" is IMHO not a good argument either: "where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability" (cited from the Wikipedia page). The main reason I wrote my article was that "in terms of practicality and usability", Markdown fails badly in many workflows because of the chaotic nature of Markdown not being Markdown. So actually, for the sake of "worse is better", you actually would need to migrate away from Markdown!

I would generally urge you to re-read my article as I think that I referred to all of your mentioned arguments and explained why I think it's still a very good approach to question Markdown dominance for the sake of "practicality and usability" of many, many people and workflows.

Tech savvy people should never settle for mediocre or really bad solutions just because it's difficult to switch. In the long run, you're losing.

We can and we should do better than that.

PropagandaDude

a month ago

Now I have an explanation for my mental model gap.

As you can see, you don't need to use any special type of characters to mark a URL as such. The tricky part comes when somebody wants to insert a URL with a description text.

I view this as broken. I'm not inserting a URL with description text. I'm inserting text that happens to also point to something else.

Text-followed-by the URL, consistent with text-followed-by a footnote indicator.

eimrine

a month ago

This is literally my thoughts condensed in text. The only reason I do not use an org-mode is that I am a Vim user.

KarlVoit

17 days ago

Sorry to take away your reason: https://gitlab.com/publicvoit/orgdown/-/blob/master/doc/Tool...

There are multiple solutions where you may use orgdown (syntax) from within vim although I bet vim implementations will never ever reach the same level as Org-mode (Elisp) does for Emacs.

As a vim + Emacs user for decades (both daily), I would really recommend to use vim for simple editing taks and Emacs for organizing your digital life: https://karl-voit.at/2020/01/20/start-using-orgmode/ and https://karl-voit.at/orgmode/

Many die-hard-vim users switched to Emacs and wrote that in their opinion, Emacs is the better vim because Emacs is able to provide everything that vim does (including vim key bindings, excluding vim-script) but not the other way round. I know that this is hard to swallow for most vim users.

YMMV HTH