Markdown is a mess. Gruber refuses to take care and now there are a ton of slightly different dialects because the original draft is clearly lacking in some respects.<p>Just last week wanted to use GFM, they introduced a new newline style. Or maybe not? In gollum it doesn't seem to be working and then there are breaking lines with two spaces. Or not? It's a desaster.<p>Some group should take over the markdown format definition.
The easiest counterargument possible:<p>Good writing doesn't need syntax. Sinclair and Joyce and Fitzgerald and Twain didn't need italics or heading tags: just like structuring a post as a list is a sign of structural weakness, designating something with a header tag is admitting defeat, is admitting "Hey, look at this, this means something is happening over here."<p>(I love Markdown, and use it daily.)
The key takeaway : "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks"... which is arguably a bit difficult when you're manipulating raw HTML and a bit... detached on WISIWYG.<p>Markdown allows sophisticated ideas to fall into text with a very simple syntax. I don't know of any other system that allows this except just plain text.<p>Edit: Hmm... looks like agreeing with the article isn't popular for some reason.
Yet, somehow all the WYSIWIG editors beat out nroff and WordPerfect.<p>Personally, the trick to writing with a word processor is to not waste <i>too</i> much time on the formatting, and just write. Also, learn to use the "sytles", just like you use CSS in an HTML file. I first learned to do significant writing in a WYSIWIG editor using Samna/Lotus Ami (accent on the i). Then Word, then Open/Libre Office. All of these have style lists. Use them! Don't waste time clicking on all the fonts, sizes, spacing, etc block after block.<p>The "Styles" menu seems to be one of the best kept secrets in Word and similar word processors.
Markdown seems to be part of the retro/hipster trend, along with flat UIs, 8-bit video game music, fixie bikes, and Pabst beer. As someone who actually lived through the 1980s, it's amusing to watch you young cats reinvent my youth.<p>I'm not saying Markdown is a bad idea, but I'm perfectly happy using the rich UI provided by a word processor when I write. Next thing you know, someone will claim that 80 characters max per line was a great idea, and there will be a little iPhone app that rings a bell when you get to column 75 so you can hit the carriage return in time. Non-skeuomorphically, of course.
The paucity of imagination in this post is depressing. Markdown isn't the future, it's the past. I mean that literally - markdown is a formalization of a set of kludges to approximate formatting when using the technology of 1970s dumb terminals. Is that really the best writing system we can come up with?<p>Clearly, it's not. One obvious improvement would be a system with the same semantics as markdown which presented these semantics using the standard typographical conventions everyone knows (italic for emphasis, larger text for headings, etc). A further improvement would be a more carefully thought through and richer semantics than the rather arbitrarily-chosen subset of HTML that markdown currently supports.
Which markdown is he talking about ?
There are no standard and each editor has it's own rules.
Bullet lists? How do you make sub bullet lists ? Use tabs ? No tab on iPad. Tables ? There is a Markdown dialect for that.<p>Markdown has limitations and needs to be standardized.
Before markdown (for me), there was Perl's POD. [0]<p>Simple to pick up, does what it says on the tin, easy to hack in, "Do What I Want", for things missing.<p>The tools for it are a little all over the place, but, "Turn this into HTML" (pod2html) works, and works well for documentation.<p>Can you write whole books with it? People do - I believe many of the Perl books put out by O'Reilly are written in a POD dialect.<p>[0]<a href="http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html" rel="nofollow">http://perldoc.perl.org/perlpod.html</a>
As everyone has noted, good writing shouldn't be bogged down with syntax, yet the author proposes people ditch editors/bars and just write it directly? If you want that, just switch to source view and write. Otherwise, I'm quite content with working in a lightweight editor with keyboard shortcuts.<p>Frankly, I prefer to format my text with HTML anyhow. Markdown is easier on the eyes, but it has limited function and is just another level of separation between what I write and what you see.
The premise here that "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks" should be questioned.<p>Who says that the content of the writing is necessarily so much more important than how it looks? There's a reason that books are meant to look nice - we enjoy the look and feel of them. Likewise, I enjoy reading things on certain blogs - e.g., The Verge, Medium, Grantland - because they look really great and it's a great reading experience.<p>I'm almost tempted to think that it's the opposite - superpowerful WYSIWYG is the future of writing. End users will get to create amazing multimedia experiences. For better or worse, writing will be freed from being just about <i>words</i>.
Markdown is like Vim -- sure, it might speed up your output, if that's your sole focus. And its not meant to be adopted en masse.<p>I'm a designer and relatively intelligent person by trade, and I have a difficult time with markdown. It requires me to have a guide open, to be able to write. No "normal folks" I know can decipher markdown.<p>The trick is to make styling easy -- not to make styling an afterthought. The writer, writing on Medium, should recognize this.
The idea the author is illustrating reminds me of this even simpler, no-distractions, plain text editor <a href="http://writer.bighugelabs.com/" rel="nofollow">http://writer.bighugelabs.com/</a><p>It works really well for me when just trying to get thoughts out into words. Then it's just a case of pasting it into a 'proper' editor later to work on the finer editing, formatting, and suchlike.
Telling me there's an 30-second overview of Markdown at the end of this post, but not providing an anchor link to get there, and another to get back, is really sloppy. It's probably as a result of Markdown's ``intentionally really simple'' syntax. I write in Markdown all the time and <i>I</i> certainly don't know how to create an anchor link within it.
The upcoming Ghost[1] blogging platform/tool has side by side post editor that supports Markdown on left and visual formatting on right. This should make it easier to learn Markdown syntax.<p>Also, I believe, Markdown is the best option for generating formatted content on touch based devices.<p>[1]<a href="http://tryghost.org/features.html" rel="nofollow">http://tryghost.org/features.html</a>
At Leanpub we bet the whole startup on Markdown, so we certainly agree! We love Markdown since it means that writers focus on writing, not on formatting...