Markdown has always supported direct raw HTML in it. I don't see any gulf or sudden jump in cost. Don't be a Markdown purist. Even John Gruber, the creator of Markdown, is not a Markdown purist. Go look at the Markdown source of his blog and you will see that he frequently just uses raw HTML. He doesn't even do multi-paragraph ordered lists in Markdown, and chooses to write <ol><li><p> instead. And he also uses <a><img> for clickable images. You can append ".text" to any of his blog article to get the Markdown source; example <a href="https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_12_pro.text" rel="nofollow">https://daringfireball.net/2020/10/the_iphone_12_and_iphone_...</a>
> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web)<p>It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive<p>>That sparse area just beyond the limits of Markdown is of vital importance to the web. These websites are not only a joy to read but also the ones that explore the web's possibilities, embracing the medium and evoking a truly web-native feel.<p>>Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them.<p>Interesting to me that you have added "focus on this paragraph" coloring to your site. I'm not against that in principle, but you have placed it farther up the page than I prefer to read and scroll. So you care deeply about my experience, have created a whole tool to inhabit an area of web design that you think is undeserved, rationalize it based on feels, and, for me, deliver a poorer experience to show it off.<p>"The Website Wasteland", as you call it, is a good thing if this is the result of populating it.
> A great example of a rich content website is the Tailwind CSS landing page.<p>This is a pretty bad example, right? It is the landing page for some web framework or whatever, that shows you it can make over-complicated websites by being itself an over-complicated website. It is being good at its job in some sense no matter what it does, because the thing it is showing is… the thing that it does.<p>But, this doesn’t show any evidence that any other websites need to be as interactive and dynamic as the tailwind website (they don’t).<p>Websites are all over-complicated, markdown is no curse. If this wall is true, it is a blessed line of defense.
Everyone else in the world - and I mean everyone - who is not a software engineer - <i>does not use Markdown</i>.<p>There is a reason for that. And it's not because they're all stupid and software engineers are all geniuses.<p>It's because <i>normal</i> people do not want to spend their day wasted in minutia, carving out huge chunks of technical jargon, just to get some words on a page to show up with a certain layout and format.<p>They want to highlight some text, and click the Bold button, or maybe Ctrl+B, and see the text become bold. They don't want to write code. They want to just make a fucking document, so they can get on with their day.<p>We have had programs that do this for about 40+ years now. They are called <i>word processors</i> and <i>presentation tools</i>. They work very well, and require absolutely zero code or weird characters.<p>But software engineers are so insanely out of touch, so cluelessly locked into their web browsers, that they literally cannot imagine a universe in which a person isn't writing code to get some text to show up on a screen, formatted and laid out.<p>It literally feels like everyone in this industry is insane.
Extended (or rather, distended) Markdown flavors always make me queasy, and I don't love the snippet from Code Hike. In my mind, Markdown is fundamentally intended to be lightweight--something for a Reddit post or a blog comment. Heavily extending its syntax instead of choosing a saner syntactic basis strikes me as ill-advised. But one can't deny the advantages for adoption to be had from using Markdown as a starting point, and the project appears to be very popular, so perhaps worse is better.
> Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them.<p>The premise is deeply flawed. Richness is not a sign of care or investment in the reader's experience. Often it's exactly the opposite. Often richness is gaudy and pointless while simplicity makes content clearer and more useful. Maybe this is a great and valuable tool for certain use cases, but the justification here is weak.
Opened this site to find the readable text was squashed into the middle maybe 10% of my screen, as much as markdown can be annoying - websites that refuse to use a reasonable portion of the browser width for readable content annoying me far more.
This doesn't back the hypothesis that there are applications (<i>cough</i> opportunities) held back by markdown's deferral of styling.<p>Markdown's chief feature is to be usable without tooling when writing, so more content is generated in the first place. So it extends the rich/cost graph to the left.<p>Because markdown is easily and often parsed, it operates as a data source from the get-go, mostly achieving the separation of concerns needed to scale to the right.<p>What are the pain or price points that will change with adopting this new technology?<p>(Is Swift-docc really the comparable? It seems to show what this is hopefully not: a subset dialect of markdown struggling with volatile, unusable hash links, no real extensibility or inter-op, tethered to BigCo's mission.)<p>(The curse of curses: they provoke negativity.)
This would be a much better article if two things changed: One, skip the scroll gimmick. It's a waste of time and space (and that has been discussed enough)<p>Two, give us examples that live in that supposed wasteland. Without those, it looks like you're building a technology in the abstract. And, don't get me wrong, it's cool tech. It <i>so</i> tickles my sense of "fun engineering challenge, great way to express structure". But I've long learned that means it's also very likely in the "overengineered" corner.<p>I share your belief that there's a "there" there. (I'm on my umpteenth iteration of my own personal markdown, so I would ;) I think it'd be helpful to crystallize that into more concrete uses.
This entire argument is weird. My website is relatively rich in content, in different contexts, including (now out of date/deprecated) interactive tutorials. Every single thing on my website is statically generated from Markdown.<p>Nothing about richness or leanness is implied or enforced by using Markdown for text, it's about everything else around it. On a statically generated page, you do it in Javascript, and render client-side if needed w/ data prepopulated in static objects. The only thing you can't do with a static page that ingests text as RST or Markdown or any other markup language, is something that requires dynamism with a backend database.<p>This is trying to blame Markdown and statically generated sites for leanness, but minimalism is a stylistic aesthetic choice people made that was a trend for awhile, it's not a requirement of the technology. The technology is just a tool.
From TFA:<p>> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web)<p>Perhaps the author's thesis is wrong.
The text graying out and scrolling effect leads to overlaps for me. Firefox 133.<p><a href="https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.ibb.co/NryLFgJ/codehike-overlap.jpg</a>
“I have created a tool, and I’m imagining that it’s very important. Just look at this data I made up!” What a joke.<p>I think the author forgot to think about the content and got all invested in the display of their site. Should have just used markdown and spent the saved time looking for actual real data.
> This jump in cost disrupts the trade-off between richness and effort. For content with a sweet spot just beyond Markdown’s limits, the additional effort often seems too high for the small gain in richness, leading to a preference for staying with Markdown and sacrificing richness.<p>Why is asciidoc not more popular? It seems to support more than markdown and seems straightforward.
> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them.<p>IMHO article would be much better while not exploring new ideas and use simple text and web-native controls instead of inconvenient accessibility-wise poor UI/UX.<p>P.S. Print preview is hilariously bad.
Almost all of the blog posts and articles I write nowadays are in Markdown, and it sure is painful sometimes when you need formatting that you just need a liiiitle bit of tweaking to get right.<p>My solution is to fork the markdown tool I use to add my own tweaks. Some of the changes I added are:<p>- Vertical padding: Typically, `---` and `*<i>` get converted to `<hr>` tags. I use `*</i>` for `<hr class="small">` that has different padding top/bottom.<p>- Code examples with syntax highlighting.<p>- Block quotes with class names: `> {.warning}`<p>- Headers and table rows with support for setting a specific anchor ID: `# Header {#myId}`<p>- `<img>` tags with CSS URL matching to apply certain styles. For example, match `<img>` tags URLs ending with `#screenshot` will have drop shadow.
The first example website given here is described "just text with minimal styling." It's not just text though, it's hypertext? Since when did everyone lose sight of what hypertext is.
I really like the format. The problem with slideshows is you either have to scroll back and forth or click on the next page buttons. This page fixes both of them. Although I can see how the fading out of the text is a bit annoying.<p>Also is anyone building websites with markdown? I thought it was just a tool to format notes and blog posts. And even then you can insert HTML in it.
> Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web<p>The problem is made-up, too, based on the author’s (incorrect) perception of markdown.<p>You can start dropping in as much or as little HTML as you want.
A fun example that shows how interactivity isn’t necessarily the best thing to judge richness by is Janet for Mortals which is 100% html and likely markdown but also embeds the Janet interpreter so you can use the language as you learn it.<p><a href="https://janet.guide/" rel="nofollow">https://janet.guide/</a>
I used to feel bad about trying to shoehorn markdown into places it clearly wasn’t suited, but Quarto put an end to those concerns. It makes damn near anything possible thanks to Pandoc, and sure beats the mish-mash of various single-purpose tooling I used to use for presentations, memoranda, static site generation, documentation, etc.
I think markdown is poorly designed, especially in terms of ease of parsing (human AND machine!)<p>I've written my own markup language, I'd love ANYONE'S feedback, either good or bad<p><a href="https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt" rel="nofollow">https://lua.civboot.org#Package_cxt</a>
This format—with each paragraph fading as you scroll, and large changing images alongside—is borderline unreadable.<p>Somewhat ironic in a blog post that (I think) is about tradeoffs between text and formatting.
I am not sure Markdown is a curse because of the gap that it creates in the chart. But I agree with one thing: we do need to explore interesting DSLs for producing beautiful documents.
What's an example of a website or feature which needs just a little bit more "richness" than a static website with formatted text and links and images?
> Imagine how many ideas are held back because their authors don’t have the right tools to express them.<p>Sir, you've reinvented text with images.
Meh. An overengineered article about markdown. I stopped reading after: "Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web".<p>MD is a tool, just as any other tool after becoming familiar with it, you know in advance if it's going to serve you well or not and of its potential limitations.<p>I keep all valuable personal notes on a local Hugo which is basically all markdown and I wouldn't have this if I had to write things down myself in any other format. So no, is not a curse at all but a timer saver for me it is.
Non-related, but this is the first time I actually like animations that happen while scrolling. I think it has something to do with the fact that I still have control over the scroll on the right.
There's a special circle of hell for places who make "plot-like" illustrations that are supposed to look like data visualisations but are just graphics. It's extremely deceptive.<p>TFA has a bunch of things which look like plots of richness vs cost but are actually just what a statistician would call "totally made-up bullshit"
I love how this is formatted - reading it in those little blocks with an image to make it more clear. It is a joy to read.<p>The actual point itself is somewhat interesting too. "curse" is a strong word though.