Markdown is much easier to write quickly than HTML. Situations where I write Markdown quickly include writing messages on Slack and for AI chatbots. I wouldn't want to use HTML in either of those cases.

The Pandoc Markdown dialect solves many of the mentioned issues. If you want a good editor for that have a look at

https://www.zettlr.com/

If we're going to define a programming language as one that is Turing complete, it's important (in a kind of pedantic sense) to note that that includes HTML (with CSS), which can be used to encode a Rule 110 automaton, and excludes C, whose standard imposes an (implementation-defined) upper bound on accessible memory, meaning it can never, even in principle†, similarly a Turing machine, which has infinite storage. This is probably not what was intended :)

† Obviously, for physical reasons given our current understanding of cosmology, no _implementation_ of a language can ever really be Turing-complete, but some language definitions are theoretically compatible with Turing-completeness, and others aren't.

In a few years we'll all laugh at how ridiculous this blog post is.

If we are still using XML/YAML/JSON etc despite all their faults and shortcomings, Markdown can (and will) last decades.

Bonus points for MD being readable even when it's not parsed. More bonus points for Sublime Text displaying it in plain text and still looking great. Good enough++

i like html fine, but org-mode, now you're talkin'. it's like the nasa voyager equivalent of text markup. just needs to be rescued from being held hostage in emacs.

Because there's only one reasonable implementation of AsciiDoc

Markdown lacks JavaScript and can be considered mostly harmless.

Strong disagree. Markdown is great. And the perfect format simply doesn't exist. You cannot be all things to all people. shrug

I rarely render it and only use it with syntax highlighting in my text editor, and that’s it. It helps structure my notes, and I love it, KISS.

This is why John MacFarlane designed djot https://djot.net/

We're not "still" using Markdown, we're only getting started.

Markdown is only going to get more popular as AI agents usage grows.

Because Markdown is quite readable in plaintext form with no Markdown-specific rendering at all. HTML isn't.

Anyone that thinks Markdown is bad is crazy. People need to be able to quickly and easily markup their text.

I love markdown for technical reporting when the alternative was a hacked together Word document.

"we" aren't using anything, "you" are.

Use the best tool for the task. markdown is really good for talking to AI as a human for example.

Same goes for JSON, YAML, etc.. use what makes sense to you. I like markdown but I have issues with it as well. I like html, but i despise it sometimes. One-size-fits-all is the real enemy.

My view is that for all *langs (markdown, config, data, code, styling,etc..) we should leave the proverbial cave and come down from the trees, and talk about interoperability and best practices. Contracts, expectations, and exceptions.

There is this pattern where we invest in some software technology, and it becomes this ideology people fight over. Or invest a lot into it and fall into sunken-cost thinking.

Being able to rapidly figure out the best tool/solution, and readily tear out the old and patch in the new with minimal loss and friction, that should be the next era of tech. Not a repeat of the old, with a slight twist. I don't need another JSON, Markdown, HTML, CSS, C, Rust,etc.. especially with the advent of LLMs (hype aside), syntax is important but it isn't what it used to be. I want to be able to write in Markdown and know that if there is a better format, I can easily stop using it and reliably transpile all my existing Markdown, and tooling that works with Markdown to use that new format.

Adaptability and communication are the biggest dead-weights holding back technological progress.

Just write in whatever language makes you happy. Nobody is forcing you to use markdown

Markdown has a lot of weird choices and works best for longer documents.

Check out my "Advent of Markdown" where I go through surprising markdown behavior: https://mastodon.social/@timokoesters/115643467322561173

HTML is not something to hold up as the standard for documentation.

i would not use html(5). XHTML? perhaps. but try to find 3 parsers, which parse html in the same way and not segfaulting.

It's not possible. HTML is worse. You need at least something, which on parsing does not segfault.

I'll give them credit for not just being another "markdown sucks, let's switch to RST" slop article. Even more so as they say they don't have a solution - because a solution would be like asking for 3/3 on "cheap, reliable, fast" or whatever your favorite version of "engineers are paid to make compromises" is.

Markdown is great at small-to-medium documents; LLMs seem to like it too possibly out of a combination of fairly logical design and lots of training examples.

Custom extensions like |||warning\nDisconnect from the internet befor trying this!\n||| get you a bit further and don't tie you into HTML.

The moment you need multiparagraph items including code blocks inside a numbered list that also has an unnumbered list child of which some of the items are images ... the person who set you that task probably doesn't understand good design, but regardless, I find you need something with an explicit tree structure, that is there are markers for both the start and end of each node such as <td> ... </td>. That necessarily makes the document harder to write, though at that complexity it'll probably be hard to read too.

I think the author is missing the point. Markdown is easy for humans to read, write, and modify. Yes, parsers can be complicated. Few people need to write parsers, so that's ok, if unfortunate for those parser authors. Orders of magnitude more people need to read, write, and modify the documents themselves, and the fact that it's easy to do so is a huge strength.

HTML is terrible when you consider these properties. It's not easy to read, and is annoying to write and modify. Ditto for any other XML-based markup language, or even something like RST. LaTeX is right out.

Ultimately the author seems to suggest plain text should be what people use? That misses the point. Plain text is great for a lot of things, but if you're going to generate HTML (or something else) from it, you need something that at least has some structure. Markdown hits a nice sweet spot where it has enough structure such that you can reasonably generate rich-text document formats from it, but not so much that non-technical users can't work their heads around the format.

He at least admitted to be a simple monkey brained developer.

Why aren't you quietly stop using Markdown?

Because it supports HTML as an escape hatch.

Textile was better, but less popular IIRC

You communicate on hacker news through plain text. You don't need to control the user don't, color, and what ads they see.

If what is to communicate, plain text is good enough. If you want to control how information is consumed, fuck of, die already.

This website, at least in dark mode, doesn't have any visible indication when text is selected.

... Which is additionally frustrating, since the links at the bottom aren't actually links (so you have to select them to copy and paste into your address bar)

Funniest part of this article is claiming * will produce a b tag then demonstrating it will usually produce a strong tag and not even noticing this.

Use LaTeX nice and simple

> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output.

...and? What a weird article. Of course two different pieces source code can produce identical output. Every single mainstream languages are like that too.

> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output. And this is just the tip of the iceberg?

> It has so many poor decisions baked in that if you try to use it it will actively fight against you the moment you think you know what you’re doing.

That misses the point. The point of Markdown is simplicity, not perfection. And that is also the reason why Markdown will prevail.

Hard, hard no on this.

Why are we using Markdown? Why do I use it every day?

It's easy to write. It's easy to read. Despite the OP's complaints, quality parsers exist.

pandoc can turn it into almost any format. We will still be writing markdown in 50 years, because the design bridges a bunch of compromises very nicely.

I actually do agree that HTML is a better one, if it is a bit easier to read the source...I want text, image and links in one place and HTML is indeed the easiest one.

BTW TempleOS terminal comes into mind. I really love the hyperlinks.

Clickbait

These examples are contrived af.

Nobody uses markdown like that bro. We like markdown because it's easy to read both rendered and raw.

There's another markdown spec that's better mystmd.org

You can say hell on your own blog.

I'm not using Markdown; I'm using plain text, along with a handful of well-understood formatting conventions which go back decades. "Markdown" is just a prettier means of displaying such text.

HTML is not a markup language anymore; it has become a lunatic application platform, and the last thing I want when trying to read some text is the intrusion of some lunatic's application.

I don't, it's not simple for the user - you can't just pick one and forget the other or you'll end you wondering why your use of the other for regular text.l suddenly broke your whole paragraph because you didn't close a mark you never use.

This is the needless complexity you wished away

I strongly dislike flexible input like __Unambiguous___, *Unambiguous*

I’m reminded of the time Microsoft allowed mistakes in html writing. They attempted to parse a wide variety of common user errors. The effect of this was no standard and nobody else able to write a Microsoft compatible parser.

I dislike Nim lang because of this. At least Nim defined the specification. Still though I think it creates more cognitive load learning every legal variation and it makes searching more difficult.

I think to authors point if Markdown actually had a strict simple definition with one way to do it and no embedded html we would be better off.

HTML tags contain letters. Naturel Language words also contain letters. But markdown tags don't contain letters, and when reading, tags and words don't get mixed up.

The issue is that simple.

Markdown is the Python of documents. As technology, and consequently technical writing increase in complexity, any reduction in barrier to access becomes increasingly necessary. The opposite of using markdown and python leads to bike shedding.

Personally, I always default to the simplest of tools. That's why I truly believe that anything meant for actual human use needs to have reasonable defaults. No "look at all the configs you can have", but a "let's get you what you need".

I've thought about this a bit too, and instead of a straight escape hatch to html when any special formatting is necessary, it might make sense to bind css to particular elements like so:

##[color:red] Heading 2

or using code blocks with particular headers which render out as normal text with the styling applied, like this:

```styling: 'ruleset here...' Lorem Ipsum Dolor ```

this does require a lot of work to consider what might be ergonomic for a particular element (by element I mean ATX headings, blocks, etc.), though.

Because to me it's good enough, the syntax is simple and it's totally readable in plaintext, which makes it the ultimate format against vendor lock-in.

I've actually tried some other markup languages like asciidoc, but went back to markdown since I found it's hard to cooperate with others with another markup language like asciidoc and it's harder to find something else than asciidoctor to render it. I could write blog posts in asciidoc but in order to make it parse-able for my SSG I'd still have to compile it to markdown.

Not sure I caught the author’s use case, but Markdown shines in the document space when you’re the author and user. It’s efficient and sufficient—lowest common denominator of ease of writing and formatting basic text.

And I say this while putting up with lousy Markdown rendering on a pet project (Django). Really needs a separate project which lets you massage the html to get the display looking it’s best.

I think markdown has problems, but this doesn't really propose a sane solution.

The need markdown solves is document formatting without needing to know or use a tag-based markup language and remaining easily human readable and editable.

That said, this is actually not the most widespread requirement. And when people need to solve this requirement, there often not tons of options. So some flavor of markdown is often the least problematic option.

As the comment count in this thread increases, the ratio responding to the headline alone, and nothing in the article, is approaching 1.0.

Easy and "good enough" very often trumps complex and comprehensive. Markdown is great precisely because it can't do a lot of things.

The only changes I'd want to Markdown:

- Reverse the link syntax braces, so the URL is in [], and the link text is in ()

- Allow table cell content to have line continuations

This article is legit, but markdown is good enough to me. Actually, I was using reStructuredText which has a better specification for writing. I switched back to Markdown because its syntax is easier to remember and fulfill most of my needs. The thing I needed was comments for adding folding marks in vim. I use inline <!-- --> to do so and that's OK.

The answer to the question in the headline:

- It's pretty easy for humans to read & write

- It's very easy for AI to read & write

- It's quite token-efficient relative to its expressiveness

- It can be used in many different contexts, so it's actually surprisingly good for interchange.

There are many formats that are better-suited for a given purpose, but Markdown remains a very attractive compromise for many applications.

For me, one major issue with md is that it does not support indentation that could be used for collapsing sections.

Most md editors don't support collapsing or folding sections, even though they could. VSCode had this feature where indentation is used as a simple hint to support collapsible sections, but md treats indentation as a code hint.

Aaron needs to hurry up and reincarnate already.

Because I think it’s fair to say it’s becoming a standard format for ai agent specs docs etc. It’s not going away anytime soon.

Markdown is for us humans. HTML is for machines.

Per keyboard stroke, you write much more content with MD than HTML.

Even without a specific browser/reader Markdown is relatively non-intrusive to read. You cant read HTML without an extra tool/effort to discard tags.

And you can parse MD with regular expressions, or can you? ;). (tip hat to infamous Stackoverflow discussion)

Markdown is essentially plain text with a couple extra features. I think Markdown’s basic appeal is that it’s plain text.

Start with Obsidian (with "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode" as defaults) for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking. Then layer in plugins like Outliner, Templater, Canvas, Relay... and realize Obsidian is almost like an OS for .md files -- which are portable, and easily human- and machine-readable.

This sounds like all the arguments against using JSON/YAML as well.

People forget how important good UX can be, sometimes.

We're using Markdown, YAML, and JSON bc they're easy to use; they're "highly memetic" (easy to learn, easy to teach, easy to spread)

They don't require many months to learn like XML, back in the day

> The real issue is that to ship a Markdown parser you also need a to ship a friendly HTML parser.

I’ve never attempted a markdown parser let alone any parser, so pardon me for asking a stupid question: doesn’t the markdown parser just let through HTML? Why does a markdown parser need to parse html?

for me as a user, I like it it's simple to use, I know for the developers it's probably very hard to parse and what not, but for most people the experience matters most. Also markdown you can use it without any parser just a text editor.

I just can't find myself summoning the energy to be mad about markdown. It's good enough for like 99% of the things I use it for. Sometimes I get annoyed at specific extension support or whatever when I realize I shouldn't be using markdown for that task.

I was lamenting the other day that we used to have SGML SHORTREF, then XML came along because supposedly SGML is just too hard to parse. But XML is for computers, not for humans. So then we got Markdown, which is worse than where we started from.

Because Markdown is awesome, easier to write, and easier to read at the source level.

I'm in no way saying that markdown is perfect but it is much better than anything else I've used. It's got me through both a bachelors and masters.

The author of this article appears to be unaware of pandoc, and even better quarto. I started with pandoc and various plugins and my own scripts but moved to quarto, it is excellent.

https://quarto.org/

I always advocate for XML. While Markdown is like "a car in any color as long as it's black", XML is a) exactly what you need and b) as precise as you need it, and also c) not more precise than necessary.

We all need headers and paragraphs, right. But I might want file listings. Or command-line snippets with my own color coding and marks. Or C declarations and precise references to them in text. Or todos. Or bibliographic information. Or I want to express the difference between emphasis and italics. Or I don't. And so on. With XML I grow my own notation that fits like a glove. There's no boilerplate, everything is there for a purpose.

Besides, it is not that incompatible with plain text. Here's plain text:

    abc def ghi

Here's well-formed XML:

    <text>
    abc def ghi
    </text>

That's all, save for two extra newlines. Plain text is the best thing when you write to think. But once you're done with thinking you might want to add a date mark, a tag, or another more structured content. With XML you can have both.

The "right element for the right meaning" crowd is always going to fall when they charge against the sheer walls of "but I like using Caution for my bulleted list" crowd. Or the "of course we put tire patches in the wiring element, it's when we use the tire patches".

Or a million other examples I've wrassled with over the literal decades.

Whatever sophisticated semantic scheme you move into the markup layer, is gonna get messed up. And then your fancy schema is just noise, very expensive noise. Markup layer needs to glue as closely to natural language constructs as possible, and then glue a little more closely than that, and let the bulk of the information derived come from natlang. It's boring, but it works, and it's easier than ever to get quantitative information out of natlang.

Keep the domain stuff out of the markup layer.

All that said, Asciidoc forever baby. Write actual books in it. Not really more complex than Markdown[1]. Beats up DITA, takes its lunch money. Win win win.

[1] Unless you go legit insane with `include` and `ifdef/ifndef/ifeval`

That is a lot of complaining for having no suggested better alternative.

And there is your answer to the clickbait title -- we're still using markdown because there's no alternative that is so much better that it is going to dethrone the one that has all the momentum from being the first good-enough take on this that got any traction.

We use markdown because LLMs are great at it.

Markdown in the same directory as the code it documents is very readable by humans and LLMs.

Given LLMs proficiency in markdown and that reading it in view and edit mode is comparable I bet many engineering teams ditch confluence/Google docs for documentation in favor of just markdown plaintext docs adjacent to code (my team has moved design/RFCs to this as well, get feedback via PR commits, turn an LLM loose to implement design)

Also if you really don’t like it I bet you could just ask the LLM to translate it. No point wasting the human input characters or tokens on a ton of <></> etc

I don't read HTML all the time, and I don't expect it to be easy to read when outside of a browser.

Markdown though, that's my slightly fancy readme. It has just enough structure that I can easily read and understand it on the command line.

I can easily grep it without need for an advanced parsing engine.

If you need something with font and style weight then go for HTML.

But if I see README.html with a project, it's going to put me off wanting to contribute. I do not want to learn that project's style guide for how to add some new parameters to a table or remember that they want to specify italics in one of a dozen different ways.

i use markdown because it's inherently limited to styling that is easy to represent. it's a good way to communicate the limitations of text-based content submission form.

if you tell somebody they can use HTML, they get frustrated when you tell them that tags other than anchor, bold, italic, list, heading, and paragraph aren't supported. but if you tell somebody they can use markdown, then they implicitly understand that the content they're submitting won't be rendered as green text on a purple background, and don't try to accomplish that.

MD is not perfect, but it’s perfectly adequate.

Markdown apologist here - I think MD is the greatest thing since sliced bread and I use it a LOT. In fact, one project I work on has an entire git repo of just MD docs. It’s easy to maintain, and even non-tech people can author them with ease. In fat, I love that raw MD is entirely human-readable, and even if someone fat-fingers some of the syntax, it’s still very forgiving.

Don’t forget, many MD renderers support regular HTML embedding, including <style> tags, which makes it a very flexible choice.

I don’t think it’s going anywhere!

Markdown is _fine_? I certainly have my own issues with it; most of which can be mitigated by adhering to a style guide (e.g. only use one syntax for <em> and <strong> as well as <ul> and headers). I'm not sure why we need both asterisks and underscores to represent the __same semantics__ – to me this feels wasteful of precious ASCII. Perhaps it was to allow the writer to express their preference while providing a shared and consistent meaning (same with the other duplicate forms). In that sense it seems to have done an <del>excellent</del> okay job at affirming common ground. I'm not sure. From what I can tell, the original author has been reluctant to do the work here and has left this for others (i.e. CommonMark).

I do love writing in Markdown, but my reasons are adjacent in some ways. It's a flat file, the syntax is easy to on-board new users with, adoption is widespread, and the HTML escape hatch is available. I only adhere to the syntax because I can usually expect a parser to exist for whatever environment I'm in.

I don't think this is the best we can do (or have done). I find myself conflicted about where to go next. Gemtext is nice! Except, what I often want is more expressiveness and consistency. This will probably be, for me, a spec that can still be run through a "reasonable" Markdown parser. When the output breaks, it still comes out as readable plain text (albeit with some weird ASCII scattered through my prose).

When you look at wisdom principles, like those of the Solomonic kind, you observe that a proverb is profoundly true, wise, and useful when you first hear it, but it starts to feel less so when you subject it to intense scrutiny/deconstruction, or try to extrapolate it to places where it's not supposed to go.

Markdown is like that.

We use it because it's an incredibly human way of writing and reading data without having to wade too deeply into the various forms of overhead that allow machines to read, process, and display it.

I used to write raw HTML for my blog because I needed more formatting and structural power than what Markdown could provide for Jekyll. Then I built my own little blog generator that uses Markdown and which pre-substitutes my own hacky syntax elements for the extras I need.

And this is what Markdown is for: its just enough above plain text such that you can get at least 95% of what you need for a blog post, whilst still have the source be easy to type and proof read.

I'm mostly fine with markdown, but I just wanted to comment, this example in the post

    # Hi
    
    I am a <ins> simple </ins> _programmer_ doing
    <span class="fancy-text"> elegant </span> programming.
    
    <div class="animation">
    
    And here is my portfolio
    
    </div>

Might not do you think it does. markdown does not include html parser per-se. It allowes HTML but has rules like

    I am a <span style="color:green">super *grinch* yall</span>

will generate

    <p>I am a <span style="color:green">super <b>grinch</b> yall</span></p

It doesn't see the span element and turn off parsing.

Similarly, the div in the first example produces div, p, close-p, close-div, because the rule isn't "find he closing tag". The rule is something like "if the line starts with html then stop parsing and just copy until the next blank line.

All that said, I know the rules and generally know how to follow them. Of course I still run into the issue that even though there's commonmark, every site and tool is running their own variation which are incompatible.

I'd like to see a less flexible markdown standard. There's no reason to have 2 different ways of italics/bold etc. Pick one, reject other text.

Why would anyone dislike markdown when it is so simple to use? My only gripe with markdown is that sometimes i forget how to include links.

As somebody who is currently trying to use structured markdown in obsidian for knowledge management and finding it a bit challenging, I agree with the author that markdown is not the ideal language for what he and I are trying to do with it, and that we'd probably be better served by something else. But I'm not necessarily convinced such a language would find a lot of adoption, because I suspect that most people using markdown aren't doing what we're doing, and are quite well served by what's there. Actually, I'm one of those people about 90% of the time -- I have never thought about any of this stuff while writing a readme or a forum post, and that's what MD is actually for. How many users are out there clamoring for a completely unambiguous markup language optimized for parsing and extensibility?

The article talks about how confusing Markdown can get. I understand, but HTML is *much* more confusing when it comes to creating technical articles. These days we are going to see more and more markdown with the advent of AI. Markdown works really we with AI because it reduces the number of tokens required for the same amount of information vs HTML.

As always, honorable mention to Typst [0] as a good balance between the readability & simplicity of Markdown with the flexibility & composability of LaTeX. I think and hoping that Typst will be the future, but for now I'm happy with Markdown.

[0]: https://typst.app

i use it because it does what i want and is easy to use.

Because we need to get information down quickly, but still have the option of parsing to a presentable format. Markdown is not perfect, but it's far better for the efficient capture of information or document authoring. I recently built AS Notes for VS Code (https://www.asnotes.io). It's markdown based, with wikilinks, mermaid diagrams, with the ability to publish to github pages etc. There is no way I'm writing my day to day notes with HTML and anchor tags without it being a huge distraction. And HTML is so much harder to read in longform if you need to come back end edit your writing. Markdown is for humans where HTML was designed to be simple, but is ultimately for parsers.

Markdown is widely used but I agree that it's a mess, there are so many dialects..

A similar but better markup is ASCIIDOC; it's formally defined and comes with a Technology Compatiblity Kit (TCK) that can be used to certify the compliance of an implementation with the spec.

When I read articles like this my reaction is always “put up or shut up.”

If you have a better idea, make it happen.

The author merely described the parameters of a solution and didn’t even attempt to solve it.

In essence, we aren’t even left certain that a better solution that satisfies all stakeholders is possible.

I wrote my MA thesis in Markdown. The good thing about Markdown is that it forced you to just write and it had enough markup to be useful, but not so much thst you depend time procrastinating getting the output perfect (like LaTeX).

Pandoc can convert Markdown to .icml this is an Adobe InDesign format which allows you to go from markdown to a professional typesetting solution including figures, footnotes etc.

Of course if you write a physics or math paper there are better solutions, but for the majority of things you could write markdown is good enough and that is the reason so much of the content you encounter is in markdown.

As someone who has written his PhD thesis in LaTeX, I wish Markdown, or more specifically Quarto, would have existed at that time. Spent too mich time setting up basic stuff that is now just 2 pre-defines styles away.

There are other options. AsciiDoc come to mind.

Well, one good reason is that a person who generally doesn't "swear" can then choose to use them very effectively when the situation warrants. If you always go to strongest words when mild ones will do, you're out of things to say when you need to make a stronger/more forceful point.

I say "heck" instead of "hell" all the time. I'm not religious, so the invented "heck" is more of a swearword.

Because being consistent helps prevent mistakes in circumstances where use of regular curse words is contraindicated. And why the fork should you care?

These things tend to get ingrained in you so you continue to use them even if you could technically use the words they replace.

fair enough, but what alternatives did you have?

I use a horrific mix of:

• Markdown (most of my notes these days, supplanting my previous use of plaintext.)

• Single-file HTML (when my use case for fancy documents exceeds markdown's limits. While you can embed HTML into markdown, renderers vary in what they allow or sanitize, and vary in how you can (ab)use style tags. I've even taken to looking up CSS rules for printed documents, since my intended target is often pdfs or actual print at that point. Occasionally, JavaScript!)

• Google docs (Android phone nonsense!)

I'd mutter something about "using the right tool for the right job", but that's probably giving myself too much credit.

Exactly. I write my own notes in markdown, it works with or without a viewer app. I am not even sure if there is a better alternative. This format is good enough for most of the casual and semi serious use cases

Commommark is the best, then looking at the most commonly implemented extensions:

- Superscript with hat symbol (^)

- Hidden content (also known as spoiler tags, content warnings, click-to-reveal, etc...) with two pipe symbols (||) at start and end of hidden content. Interact with the content to show the content inside.

- Table syntax to show tabular data and align content with pipe, hyphen, colon symbols

---

After that, I'd look at the extensions that are only useful for the use-case you're targeting:

- Subscripting with tilde symbol (~)

- IDs, Classes and Attributes

- Task lists

- Sections / Containers

- Language labels for code blocks

- Math Support (mathml, latex, katex, etc...)

- Table of Contents / Footnotes

- Definition lists

- etc...

Just search "Markdown grammar"

Check out commonmark

Because I think, that there are other formats, whose formatting rules are more intuitive than Markdown's formatting rules. For example:

    (1) I can never remember, whether I need to use [] or () first, when embedding an image. In Org mode syntax one simply uses [] for both parts.
    (2) Or whether ** is bold or italic or * is bold or italic. Other formats use the well known / to mean italic, which optically already makes more sense and also doesn't interfere with something being bold or not, because it is a separate symbol. This makes Markdown also harder to parse btw..

Problem with that is that the default browser styling is extremely ugly and the ability for custom style sheets was removed from the browser GUI many years ago. ReaderMode and Addons can help, but as long as the default is essentially broken and unsupported that whole approach remains a dead end.

On top of that come issues like the lack of pagination support in browsers, which make long document impossible to read and practically require to add custom UI inside the website itself.

ePub works much better, with readers giving control over line spacing, font size, pagination and proper markup for TOC and other metadata, but despite ePub being based on xHTML, browsers have ignored it (only old Edge supported it for a little while).

Doesn't surprise me at all.

I've heard them called "backronyms", which I quite like.

html comes with baggage.

---

If you're writing a parser, you might have text nodes, and bold/italics nodes which can contain each-other and text nodes. Example:

- bold node

-- italics node

--- text node

But if you add html support, you're going to run into strings like this:

<b><i>text content</b></i>

How easy is it for you to represent that?

What about:

not bold or italic <b>bold but not italic <i> bold and italic </b> italic but not bold </i> not bold or italic

What about:

</b> not bold <b> bold <b> bold again? </b> is this still bold? </b> what about now? <b>

I see one, but then maybe I am just seeing things.

The wikipedia page about "worse is better" re: software linked above states:

  It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.

Copernicus' idea about money has a similar structure - "better" money such as precious metals, art, etc. is being hoarded due to its perceived desirability, leading to more "worse" money in circulation. As a result, the "worse" money is actually "better" at fulfilling its role as currency (bc it's not hoarded). So there is also a point where "worse" becomes "better".

Have you tried Asciidoc though? It is, IMHO, much clearer than markdown (YMMV, obviously), and exactly the same pros you gave of markdown can be said of Asciidoc.

Bonus: It starts simple but can be used to do whole books if needed.

> I think one of Markdown‘s biggest sins is how it handles line breaks. Single line breaks being discarded in the output guarantees that your nicely formatted text will look worse when rendered.

My experience has been the complete opposite. Markdown parsers that don’t discard single linebreaks (e.g. GitHub-flavored markdown) turn my nicely formatted text into a ragged mess of partially-filled lines. Or for narrow display widths, an alternating series of long and short lines.

Markdown parsers that correctly discard single linebreaks make sure that the source text (reflowed to fit a max number of characters per line) and the rendered text (reflowed to fit the display width per line) both look reasonable.

You kind of do need Emacs though, as far as I know it is the only existing fully compatible implementation. As soon as the file is outside that environment, all bets are off. I tried using org-mode instead of Markdown once, not for long.

Somehow basically only Discord gets it almost perfectly right though.

It makes quite a few right calls, but still tries to not be a strict subset of Markdown, requiring e.g. a different editing mode.

  *bold*
  _italic_
  *_bold italic_*
  _*also bold italic*_

> the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and ()

I remember it as passing parameters to a function that requires an URL as an argument. Maybe it's not the most straightforward way, but it works for me

I used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails.

In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."

Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."

> I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages.

HTML? Also my markup language I created for myself, which is currently not published.

Not wrong, perhaps a little weird. HTML is a first class citizen in the commonmark (spec)[https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#html-blocks].

I don’t like WYSIWYG editing, as it makes the formatting invisible.

Ugh, troff. It's mind-boggling that the closest way to have an actual (hyper)link in a manpage is to use your pager's "search for text" function. No, "JuSt usE gNu iNfO it'S beTtER" is not an answer either.

    echo 'Hi there! Have a [hyperlink](https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/manual/groff.html).' | lowdown -st man | groff -man -Thtml

  .Lk https://dotat.at/ "Tony Finch’s web site"

But it is a bad reason that goes against the reasons for the creation of Markdown.

Ah! Yeah, that makes more sense—I misinterpreted you at first since I don't normally think of “internal link” as the default exemplar of “hyperlink”. And yeah, I don't see good target markup for that. Stuff like starting your search regexp with “^ +” helps but is still janky. I'd tend to categorize this mostly as “man pages aren't meant to be long treatments of more complex software”, of course? Some large packages do something which I kind-of like but which I'm not sure would work well if everyone did it (mainly due to ergonomy around disambiguation) where they split up a bunch of their documentation into shorter pages with the origin as part of the section when making it accessible through man: pcap_init(3pcap) from libpcap, Bigarray(3o) from OCaml. Shells, as you notice, get hit by this really hard; Zsh tries to do some splitting in the man version of its docs, but it's really not enough, like I'd want to see fc(1zsh) (and then fc(1bash), etc.) but instead it's all in zshbuiltins. (Eventually I facepalmed when I realized an Info version was available and switched to that. The way I found this out was actually by eyeing the Zsh source tree and noticing that the documentation files were written in Yodl, which I'd never heard of, and then noticing that the schema they were using looked a lot like Info…)

… wow, hang on, I just checked for Bash, and it has an Info file but it says it's just an intro and the manual page is the definitive version‽ That's… hah. There must be some timeline jank around that; ambiguous NIH vibes around Info aside, I wouldn't have expected it from an actual GNU program! Did Bash show up before Info existed?

That is an unjustified over-generalisation.

HTML markup is pretty readable (except when it becomes soup) and I read and write raw HTML documents all the time. I like it better than markdown.

It's even more readable in a code editor that distiguishes tags from content.

On this planet, humans have read HTML without parsing for years. People building their first websites without any significant technical knowledge stole HTML by reading the source of other sites and edited it by hand.

I don't think they were appreciating that HTML could be read unrendered. I think they meant that it was up to the browser to render HTML with sensible but unspecified or otherwise user-specified styling (the browser is supposed to be a "user agent", remember?) before web designers started aiming for pixel-perfect control through CSS.

A man page is simply a formatted text file. The display of it is performed by the program defined in the MANPAGER or PAGER environment variable, or by a default program, usually less(1). That is the program that would be responsible for navigating any hyperlinks, and the format of references to other pages is already pretty easy to pick out so developing a man page reader that could follow references to other man pages would not be particularly difficult. Many web-based and GUI man page viewers do this. Example: https://github.com/zigalenarcic/mangl

If I’m understanding correctly, your rules are based on word boundaries? How do you define a word boundary?

So y = x * 7 + b * c will be bolded in the middle?

Your quotation and list syntax should work out of the box in most Markdown flavors (HN has a very non-standard and crippled version - basically nothing other than italics, paragraphs, and code/preformatting works.)

Strikethrough and bold are doubled to avoid common ambiguities. Your underline should technically work, but it comes out as an <em> (emphasis) tag, which is rendered as italics in most browsers.

One problem with the /italics/ form is that it's not convenient when writing about filesystem paths (though I do like its visual indication of slanting).

Yeah, *asterisks* for italic has always felt wrong to me. I can understand underscores if slashes cause confusion with file paths.

*bold* and _italic_ would have been better.

  `(monospace)
  _(underline)
  /(italics)
  ~(overstrike)

Thanks for posting this. I feel like for years we've been getting gaslit by the Markdown guys who inexplicably decided that stars should make text go italic instead of bold. I get it wrong every single time and then have to go back and look up a cheat sheet. It really isn't intuitive at all, and it also doesn't codify how we used to write before rich text entry boxes where available everywhere. Markdown reminds me more of all the custom wiki and forum markups that proliferated in the 2000s than any text-based conventions in use prior.

I have long used underscores for _emphasis_, but I never made the connection that it was meant to resemble an underline until now.

I have historically used asterisks for emphasis and slashes for the use/mention distinction.

Org-mode FTW

But Usenet style didn't have a trendy name, an 'inventor' or Github stars. So it didn't exist.

Disappearing asterisks is just terrible UX. It should turn bold but keep the asterisk displayed so you can still edit as normal.

The bullet point problem is fixed by only bolding when the asterisks are on either end of word characters.

Do you enable visibility of tab and space?

> So you can still see the actual text that you're editing

But you're not editing that text! You're editing some other text and see a bunch of asterisks all over the place. And this is especially bad in nested styles - try some colored bold word in a table cell - without hiding the markup you'll basically lose most of visibility into the text/table layout

> to reduce ambiguity

it does the opposite, you can't easily distinguish between an asterisk and an asterisk, which is... ambiguity

> can't distinguish between adding more bold text to currently bold text or adding non-bold text immediately

Sure you can. In a well-designed editor you'll see the style indicator right near your caret is so it's always obvious whether and how your typed text is styled or not.

In a not-so-well-designed editor you'll get that indicator far away from your caret or just get asterisks appearing when you need them.

In a not-designed editor you'll see them all the time even when they don't serve any purpose.

Heh, I'm not even sure WordStart other styles at that level. Changing the color back then would mean having the print job pause and the screen prompt you to change ink ribbon and press a key to continue. I can't remember if it could also prompt to change the daisy wheel, or whether font was a global property of the document. The daisy wheels did have a slant/italic set, so it could select those alternate glyphs on the fly from the same wheel. Bold and underline were done by composition, using overstrike, rather than separate glyphs.

But yeah, this tension you are describing is also where other concepts like "paragraph styles" bothered me in later editors. I think I want/expect "span styles" so it is always a container of characters with a semantic label, which I could then adjust later in the definitions.

Decades later, it still repulses me how the paragraph styles devolve into a bunch of undisciplined characters with custom styling when I have to work on shared documents. At some point, the only sane recourse is to strip all custom styling and then go back and selectively apply things like emphasis again, hoping you didn't miss any.