Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
Whether you’re really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!
Markdown. Its only in tech-spaces that its preferred, but it should be used everywhere. You can even write full books and academic papers in markdown (maybe with only a few extensions like latex / mathjax).
Instead, in a lot of fields, people are passing around variants of microsoft word documents with weird formatting and no standardization around headings, quotes, and comments.
I think Obsidian and Logseq are helping to change this.
Man, I’ve written three novels plus assorted shorter form stories in markdown.
There’s a learning curve, but once you get going, it’s so fluid. The problem is that when it comes time to format for release, you have to convert to something else, and not every word processor can handle markdown. It’s extra work, but worth it, imo.
Just set up pandoc and Bob’s your uncle. It’ll convert markdown to anything. You’ll never have to open another word processor.
Nice! Thanks for the tip!
Edit: holy shit, how have I never run across that before? That’s a brilliant program right there.
Pandoc + [your markdown editor of choice] is magic. Some editors even come with Pandoc as a dependency so you can export to more or less anything from the GUI. I think GhostWriter and Zettlr at least (I honestly can’t be sure, I’ve changed editors so often and now I just have some Pandoc conversion scripts in my file manager menu).
Markdown is terrible as a standard because every parser works differently and when you try to standardize it (CommonMark, etc.), you find out that there are a bajillion edge cases, leading to an extremely bloated specification.
Most ppl have settled on Commonmark luckily, including us.
Have you read the CommonMark specification? It’s very complex for a language that’s supposed to be lightweight.
What’s the alternative? We either have everything specified well, or we’ll have a million slightly incompatible implementations. I’ll take the big specification. At least it’s not HTML5.
An alternative would be a language with a simpler syntax. Something like XML, but less verbose.
And then we’ll be back to a hundred slightly incompatible versions. You need detailed specifications to avoid that. Why not stick to markdown?