On Fri, 13 Dec 2013 01:53:09 +0000 Nick <suckless-...@njw.me.uk> wrote:
> > Quoth Thorsten Glaser: > > I absolutely d̲e̲t̲e̲s̲t̲ Markdown. > > Really? Why? I quite like it (at least smu's subset). Works for the > simple usecases I need it, and keeps the angle brackets of doom away > from me. > Markdown solves only one shortcoming of HTML (shared by all markups/formats from Addams Family): verbosity. It is still non-strict, which is main source of pain for me, not sure about Thorsten. Splitting in paragraphs is pretty much implicit, moreover empty line is also used to end blocks of other kinds. Switching between line concatenation and line breaking is too terse: two spaces at the end of line - I don't consider that a good choice. It is very easy to hit corner cases with Markdown. Example: code block inside bullet list. Some flavours of Markdown have fenced code blocks, sometimes with different syntax, some don't have that sugar at all. So there is no universal solution. This is another issue with Markdown, which is a supposedly interchangeable format. It isn't, thanks to implicit nature and non-strict syntax, it is almost guaranteed that every implementation will behave a bit differently (add flavouring on top of that). There are solutions for some of this issues. When formating something with Markdown becomes tricky, invite Uncle Fester back (HTML). Still mixing HTML and Markdown defeats somehow whole purpose of using lightweight markups. This comes from experience I had few years ago: converting more than 100 pages of old documentation in custom markup (similar to Plain Old Documentation) to Markdown. In the middle of process I wanted to hurt someone badly: one additional or one missing empty line that breaks half of document (welcome back MS Word?). It is easy to write own custom Markdown parser, but throwing the same document at e.g. Github is a major advantage you probably don't want to lose. Still I'm more than fine with using Markdown for simple thing like generating list of links and so on. -- Paul Onyschuk
