Markdown (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

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moswald@reddit

The comment thread. 😆 The internet had always been full of haters and curmudgeons.

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flying-sheep@reddit

I fully agree with the first comment: rST is extensible and therefore better for things like technical writing than Markdown.

Really unfortunate that they didn't build roles and directives into markdown. Now I keep wondering about what could have been.

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levir@reddit

I don't. It's not a coincidence that markdown has been used widely, while reST never really gained a lot of market share outside specialist applications.

Markdown became popular because is limited in scope to the most useful features. It's like JSON in that way. Minimal, familiar and pretty easily reimplementable.

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flying-sheep@reddit

I disagree. The lack of extensibility isn’t something Markdown can recover from, it’s the reason that there’s a million incompatible dialects.

I think Markdown makes quick & dirty use much easier, e.g. its inline link syntax is good for Reddit comments, but rST’s bad inline link syntax encourages explicit link syntax, which is much better for long, often-edited technical documentation.

The same applies for the ability to do both italic and bold – not a thing you’d actually use in real documents, but good to have on Reddit.

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runawayasfastasucan@reddit

Yet Markdown is what is used.

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flying-sheep@reddit

Yes because of what I said: people know it from short form writing and default to it for things it's bad at.

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runawayasfastasucan@reddit

Or people think it works for that and is easy and thus is good at it.

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flying-sheep@reddit

rST is just as easy, it’s just less familiar. As said: the only part that’s harder is inline link syntax, but rST’s explicit link syntax is easier so it’s better for text that has to be maintained for a long time.

In rST, instead of the (bad)

This `link <https://bleb.com>`__ sucks.

you write

This link_ rules.

.. _link: https://bleb.com

which is much more readable then interspersing URLs inside of your text.

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13steinj@reddit

Except again, markdown is not a spec, it never was. the CommonMark spec came from it, yes, but the original was just a reference implementation from John Gruber. It spawned a bunch of variants, one of which at least (Obsidian) is extensible. The unfortunate part is "how do you tell someone what extensions you need to install) but there are ways around that.

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flying-sheep@reddit

It’s not just a modular thing where you mix and match features as you want. There are subtle incompatibilites, things completely missing from some implementation you committed to years ago, and so on.

Unspecified languages are always a pain in the ass.

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QualitySoftwareGuy@reddit

In my experience, I think most that use Markdown use such a limited subset of it that they're not even aware of there being different dialects.

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vowelqueue@reddit

The syntax that gets me a programmer is the triple backtick. I always forget where it's supported and where it's not (and somewhat insanely, it's supported on New Reddit but not Old Reddit)

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ShinyHappyREM@reddit

(and somewhat insanely, it's supported on New Reddit but not Old Reddit)

That's why I load my code into Notepad++, let it convert all tabs to whitespace, and replace "\n" with "\n ".

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slaymaker1907@reddit

I think the variants are a strength, not a weakness. That means it is a simple spec with plenty of room for customization depending on your needs. It’s like scheme: a simple base spec. The simplicity also makes it easy to implement in different environments.

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ForeverAlot@reddit

Easy to implement in accidentally or deliberately incompatible and non-portable ways. Which takes us back around to the point that Markdown scales poorly in volume and time, both of which are characteristics of structured documentation.

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Kered13@reddit

Like how Reddit has two different dialects of Markdown, depending on if you are using old Reddit or new/mobile.

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flying-sheep@reddit

Yeah no, definitely a weakness to have to juggle a combinatoric explosion of parsers and plugins and subtle bugs.

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bzbub2@reddit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

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zephyrtr@reddit

It did everything, and therefore it did nothing.

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atomic1fire@reddit

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power

Maybe even Atwood's law, given that Javascript became such a big backend language despite initially being intended for webpages.

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En-tro-py@reddit

split between developers on the east and west coasts of the United States.

Didn't know the coastal beefs extended to software devs too!

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ForeverAlot@reddit

Markdown became popular because of monopolies and the network effect. Approximately nobody assessed its feature set, which is adequately demonstrated by everything that culminated in CommonMark.

Markdown is unrivaled for shitposting, but Markdown supports structured documentation the same way MD5 supports password encryption.

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flying-sheep@reddit

I think rST’s cumbersome link syntax also helped.

I like that it encourages people to use explicit link targets, as that makes the source code much easier to read, but for e.g. comments on Reddit it’s overkill.

So you’re 100% correct: Markdown is good for the quick&dirty so it became ubiquitous, and now most people know it and use it for e.g. technical documentation despite rST being much better for that.

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ForeverAlot@reddit

I think rST’s cumbersome link syntax also helped.

I will grant that AsciiDoc, rST, and wikitext all have comparatively lousy hyperlink syntaxes for short-form writing specifically.

Now Markdown is in Rust and Java, too, and both have had to make special concessions to make hyperlinking competitive with the classic @link doctag. They've done all right, sure, but Markdown perpetually reveals itself to be inadequate.

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Kered13@reddit

I will die on the hill that BBCode is better than Markdown.

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levir@reddit

BBCode is not better than Markdown at the problem Markdown aimed to solve. BBCode is a format for allowing untrusted input to be formated to HTML for forums and likewise. It's decent at that. But BBCode, unlike Markdown, has pracitally no advantage over raw HTML for trusted input.

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DDFoster96@reddit

That assumes you are translating the BBCode into HTML. There are many applications for markup where HTML is not involved.

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levir@reddit

I would not consider BBCode for anything else, that's what it's designed for and that's what it's (arguably) good at. Markdown, on the other hand, could be used for other applications.

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x021@reddit

Roles and directives? Sweet lord no, it would have killed the simplicity.

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flying-sheep@reddit

As said, you want that simplicity for Reddit comments, but you want extensibility for technical writing. Technical writing isn’t simple. You need graphs, math, and much more, and doing syntax extensions for each would make your Markdown dialect an incompatible mess of extensions that grew in an organic way instead of being planned that way.

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Patman128@reddit

Umm, ackshully ☝🤓 reStructuredText already exists, so there's no reason for this "Markdown" thing to exist. And what about extensibility? Obviously no one will use a markup language they can't extend with 30 extra custom directives.

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13steinj@reddit

TBPH I love markdown!

But it is not sufficient for general documentation markup. Concise summary docs, sure, but not for extensive documentation (which commonly needs various custom extensions).

But markdown isn't a markup language. It's loose spec for a family of markup languages. There's sundown, snudown (reddit), snudown-js (new reddit), github-flavored-markdown, gitlab-flavored-markdown, commonmark (which IIRC should cover the main usages), and of course, Obsidian (which supports these many custom extensions).

If anything what I like about Obsidian is that it's concise even with the custom extensions / directives. But I would like a local live reST renderer/editor as well. If only Obsidian supported both.

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breadcodes@reddit

github-flavored-markdown

Kramdown!

Also, I'd love a markdown document syntax for complex alignments, vector formats like SVG, inline images, and scientific and mathematical notations... Actually, I think I just want HTML without so much XML bloat...

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AlwaysShittyKnsasCty@reddit

Add me to the list. I love the idea of XML, but the implementation is so unwieldy. I’ve made it my life’s side hustle to create a markup language that is easy and clean (I was a designer originally, so you better believe my code is aligned and spaced properly). So far, I’ve reinvented several other languages but worse. I’m not giving up though. I’ll let you know if I ever come up with something revolutionary.

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SwiftOneSpeaks@reddit

Sign me up as interested! I love markdown - the format works as plain text OR rendered - but there are certain key pieces it's missing and most suggestions for patching the hole are just creating a lesser html (at best) or less yaml (at worst)

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gimmeslack12@reddit

In the early days, for a moment, it was a shared wonder to comment and chat with folks. It was a fun 24 hours.

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agentoutlier@reddit

I wonder if Aaron was alive today what he would use or prefer. I have to wonder if he tried Org Mode or even if he liked Emacs (I know he mentioned Textmate at one point).

The problem with Org Mode is that it is mainly Emacs and its collaboration support is minimal compared to wiki but for note taking and or blogging it is superior than just using Markdown.

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syopest@reddit

One thing is for sure, he would be disappointed that reddit is no longer hosting his favourite subreddits that he championed for, jailbait and coontown.

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Saint_Nitouche@reddit

Guy really excited to tell others at the party that John Lennon beat his wife

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syopest@reddit

Eh, the guy literally said that child porn is fine.

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MadCervantes@reddit

Worth noting he was 16 when he wrote the post in question.

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syopest@reddit

And never deleted it or wrote or said a word against it.

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wpm@reddit

Probably because he died.

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atomic1fire@reddit

TBH a lot of default subreddits also defended that one jailbait mod who got outed by gawker.

But also Gawker was the same blog that illegally kept up a sex tape and got sued out of existence so maybe it cancels out.

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acadian_cajun@reddit

When I google Aaron Swartz, jailbait, and coontown, I basically only see this thread as a result. Do you have any evidence that he championed them?

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syopest@reddit

They were a part of reddit when he was here and he advocated for the legalization of child porn.

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acadian_cajun@reddit

Your first point doesn't prove your first comment.

Your second point, as the commenter downthread points out, happened when he was 16, and to steelman someone who is dead and can no longer speak for themselves, may have been about a nuanced point about "victimless crimes" and the harsh sentences that society imposes on people committing those crimes.

I would not say it this way, I think it's a bad take, but again, words of a teenager, words of a man over a decade dead.

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max123246@reddit

I forget just how old Python is sometimes. It feels like it'd be a newer language

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sailing67@reddit

saving this. aaron swartz deserved so much better

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syopest@reddit

Aah aaron swartz, the guy whose version of free speech was subreddits like coontown and jailbait.

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sereko@reddit

Do you actually have evidence he believed what he was saying? All I could find is a slate article.

Swartz had a habit of making provocative arguments that he may or may not have taken seriously. As a teenager, he questioned the “absurd logic” of laws that banned the distribution and possession of child pornography.

It sounds like he was making a point of some sort but the article didn’t go into it.

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chucker23n@reddit

From what I gather about him, I would imagine he was making more of a libertarian point there. Not “I like child porn” so much as “the extent to which its possession is prosecuted is government overreach”.

In any case, we’ll probably never know now, and that’s also way off-topic regarding Markdown.

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EliSka93@reddit

Instead we got to keep Sam Altman...

I want a refund.

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T-MoneyAllDey@reddit

I love the top comment.

Why does this even exist

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