I like this more than you’d think; my whole website is an extended exercise of Doing Cool Stuff with CSS and HTML generated from Markdown, but I always feel a little uncomfortable doing anything too fun when userstyles are not common practice. I could totally create a style switcher with Javascript, but… wouldn’t it be better if that were built into the client?
Reader mode in Firefox is what I’d like to fall back to, but it doesn’t handle my footnotes right now. :(
That’s a very interesting idea! Federation already kinda attempted that and honestly Diaspora is a much better idea than Mastodon in regard that it encouraged web of documents rather than web of sentences.
However is markdown the right format? Isn’t it basically the worst format that won the human/machine document format wars? For example asciidoc is widely regarded as being superior to markdown.
Not everyone agrees with you so I’d kinda need to see a citation there. Even if the original markdown was deeply inadequate, the ecosystem these days seems to have patched up the holes in the walls, whether as a cause or consequence of its overwhelming victory in the aforementioned war.
As someone who has written books in markdown I can surely say it’s not good enough while alternatives like rst and asciidoc etc. are good enough.
Main problem with markdown is that it doesn’t support many of basic styling issues like imagine alignments, footnotes, image captions that are vital for anything that is slightly bigger than a web comment. There are glaring issues with markdown like double spaces for newlines and so on that are just bad design.
Unfortunately it seems like the ship has sailed and markdown “won” for the most part. Now let the patching commence and we’ll end up with a Frankenstein’s monster sooner or later.
I mean, I’m not just playing devil’s advocate here–your personal-experience-driven sense of what’s crucial and what’s peripheral in terms of “good enough” is valid for you, but other people clearly think differently or they wouldn’t be making a direct asciidoc v. markdown comparison in the markdown spec intro.
Anything short of LaTeX makes trade-offs to increase readability at the expense of other stuff. Extensive familiarity with a markup language decreases our ability to perceive whether it’s approachable enough for new non-technical folks. Because of that, and because of the relative greater important of their experience (I who Care about these things and am decent with installs have a million options available to me, but does my manager’s manager’s manager? Does my aunt?) I kinda have to look at the flaws (significant trailing whitespace is an abomination, you are correct) like… “well, obviously this doesn’t matter as much as my instincts would suggest.”
Footnotes are IMO a great example of something that should only be supported via plugin because boy do people have different ideas about how they should work (cf. LaTeX’s options)
this one drives me nuts. I read an issue on this and the markdown people were insistent on letting text flow through newlines
FYI you can force newline with backslash like
Once upon a time\ there was a underwhelming text formatting standardHowever it’s not always supported.
For example
lemmy supports it (you can check comment’s source)
Github however, does not.
thanks, true. my peeve is with disregarding normal newlines. from a utilitarian point of view it probably makes sense, just a personal pet peeve.
I think it makes sense if you’re imagining a workflow where something is going from terminal type display, where line width is to be enforced with rigor and no mercy, to a display format, where it’s really the CSS’s problem. That said, it has killed my old habits about distinguishing soft and hard breaks, so …
yep, as long as a main target is an html display, it makes sense. in my case, I take notes in a way that restrains my syllable count to about 10-15 per line to encourage conciseness and my target is pdf—not a use case I expect markdown to accomodate, but it would be nice if I could tell pandoc to preserve new line but pandoc defers to md rules
Not sure what you mean by that. Terminals do soft-wrapping and any human formatting should rely on soft-wrapping rather than hard-coding paragraph formatting.
Not a rationale my team would accept re: git commit msg line length :)
No, I definitely agree with you. Markdown is a human format so readability newlines should be soft-wrapped rather than hardcoded. It should respect newline as it was intended.