Why are we still using Markdown?

andai

Aaron needs to hurry up and reincarnate already.

otterley

Because, like UNIX/Linux itself, worse is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better - and perfect is the enemy of "good enough." We want to encourage people to produce written output with minimal friction. Barriers to writing--and especially barriers to producing documentation--should be minimized. Writing well is difficult enough! Markup is overhead. Complex markup is even more overhead. Markdown is the best compromise we know of today that provides just enough structure and typographic capability, while imposing very little cognitive load on the author. Besides, if you need something more complicated these days, you can have your favorite AI agent do it.

fl4regun

i use it because it does what i want and is easy to use.

sethherr

This website, at least in dark mode, doesn't have any visible indication when text is selected. ... Which is additionally frustrating, since the links at the bottom aren't actually links (so you have to select them to copy and paste into your address bar)

dangus

When I read articles like this my reaction is always “put up or shut up.” If you have a better idea, make it happen. The author merely described the parameters of a solution and didn’t even attempt to solve it. In essence, we aren’t even left certain that a better solution that satisfies all stakeholders is possible.

causal

These examples are contrived af. Nobody uses markdown like that bro. We like markdown because it's easy to read both rendered and raw.

andersco

Because I think it’s fair to say it’s becoming a standard format for ai agent specs docs etc. It’s not going away anytime soon.

docheinestages

I don't think Markdown should be (ab)used as a programming language. It should be treated as a plaintext container that has some formatting to organize the contents.

kennywinker

Ambiguous means unclear meaning, not that there is more than one way to achieve the same thing. Html has that same problem. Think <b>, <strong>, <p style=“font-weight: 900;”>, etc. That’s life. Get used to it.

BoredPositron

You can say hell on your own blog.

timokoesters

Markdown has a lot of weird choices and works best for longer documents. Check out my "Advent of Markdown" where I go through surprising markdown behavior: https://mastodon.social/@timokoesters/115643467322561173

sorrymate

The article talks about how confusing Markdown can get. I understand, but HTML is *much* more confusing when it comes to creating technical articles. These days we are going to see more and more markdown with the advent of AI. Markdown works really we with AI because it reduces the number of tokens required for the same amount of information vs HTML.

stared

Not many keystrokes to get a readable text. Yes, it has issues. But at its core, it is a plaintext with extra stuff, and no temptation to turn it into a webapp. (See my footnotes on HTML vs MD for saving text in https://p.migdal.pl/blog/2025/02/markdown-saves/ ). Yes, there is a problem with "many ways to do the same thing". The solution is ease - use a linter or autoformatter. No more bikeshedding. If you plan to use a clean yet expandable syntax, look at Typst. One of its core design principles ( https://github.com/typst/typst?tab=readme-ov-file#design-pri... ) is: > Simplicity through Consistency: If you know how to do one thing in Typst, you should be able to transfer that knowledge to other things. If there are multiple ways to do the same thing, one of them should be at a different level of abstraction than the other. E.g. it's okay that = Introduction and #heading[Introduction] do the same thing because the former is just syntax sugar for the latter.

quelsolaar

Mark down is great because it doesn't define a bunch of things. Headline? Its a headline, no font, no sizing, no colors... Just a headline. It means that it can be displayed on any device, printed on any paper, work with any accessibility tool and optimized for what ever requirements the reader has, not what ever the writer thought looked good. The web is full of great content being made hard to access because of poor/inflexible layout choices. Just give me the text and let me choose how to make it readable. The added fact that you can read raw markdown without even parsing it makes it even better. Not having total control over what its going to look like for the reader is a feature not a bug.

raincole

> These 2 produce IDENTICAL output. ...and? What a weird article. Of course two different pieces source code can produce identical output. Every single mainstream languages are like that too.

runjake

Because Markdown is awesome, easier to write, and easier to read at the source level.

BeetleB

All problems are solved once you embrace org-mode. All you need is Emacs! Nothing more!

fny

Everyone seems to forget Markdown was invented for humans and incidentally for machines. Almost everyone who complains has some parser or rendering related agenda. No one cares if you can't nest asterisks inside underscores. Most of these edge cases don't read well as Markdown, which defeats the purpose.

Arainach

Somewhat related past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41120254 Copying my thoughts from there which haven't changed: >To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?" Yes. A thousand times yes. Because the biggest advantage of Markdown is that it's easy to read, and its second-biggest advantage is that it's easy to write. How easy it is to parse doesn't matter. How easy it is to extend is largely irrelevant. Markdown may or may not be the best tool for writing a book, but Markdown is the best tool for what it does - quickly writing formatted text in a way that is easy to read even for those who are not well versed in its syntax. I don't want to write a book. If I did I'd use LaTeX before RST. I want something to take notes, make quick documentation and thread comments. ***** My thoughts on strictly-defined XML-ish syntaxes are the same: they're harder for humans to read, write, and modify, which defeats the primary purpose and benefit of Markdown. Very few people have to write a Markdown parser. Many orders of magnitude more have to read and write Markdown. Optimize for them even if it makes writing the parser painful.

chrisweekly

Start with Obsidian (with "Live Preview" and "Editing Mode" as defaults) for fantastic WYSIWYG note-taking. Then layer in plugins like Outliner, Templater, Canvas, Relay... and realize Obsidian is almost like an OS for .md files -- which are portable, and easily human- and machine-readable.