| > They are all mostly consistent with the core markdown. it's fairly easy to get the brain-dead part "right". even down to replicating gruber's original bugs and his corner-case complications. > They are inconsistent in their extensions. that's precisely my point. and the crux of the problem. > Markdown was meant to codify already in use norms markdown's markup did not differ significantly from that of asciidoc or restructured-text. all of them, including setext, leveraged existing conventions from e-mail and usenet. > and to emphasize readability over all else since nobody is meant to actually _read_ raw markdown,
i've never understood why everyone cites that passage so religiously,
other than that is part of the origin story mythology. > I think that's highly simplistic, and ignores the realities. due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed. the _only_ reason markdown was the choice of the masses was because it looked "easier" to a lazy tl;dr mentality. which is a false economy for which the light-markup revolution will have to continue to pay for years down the line. well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too. at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion, so the last move here will be yours, if you choose to make it. we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway. |
Because that's not a universal feel, and some people do read it. I write a subset of markdown normally in text. I use asterisks for bold, use a hash for section headings, and use unordered and ordered lists as defined. I value that I write the same thing, and sometimes it's just text and sometimes it gets prettified, and I really don't need to care the majority of the time whether it does or not, because for the most part people understand the conventions used in the plain text.
Here's the kicker, in one job I designed a system to send email to customers that took advantage of this, and if you supplied a text message to email and the markdown version was different, automatically generated a multi-part email with the plain text part being the markdown, and the HTML part being the generated output from the markdown.
> due mostly to netnewswire, which installed gruber as its default mac-blogger, gruber's reach was phenomenal when blogging first went viral. if you don't understand the power of that reach at that time, it's probably because you weren't around. and that group of "cool internet kids" still flaunts itself, most notably recently in the nearly-immediate widespread uptake of json-feed.
I think you vastly overestimate the pull Gruber had over the general people at that time. I didn't know anything about him, but it wasn't because I wasn't around, I was already working in the industry. It was because I didn't have anything to do with Apple products and didn't care. Which is the same for most people. We're talking about three years pre-iphone here. Before the unibody macbook. Apple's core product that was tapping a wider audience was the iPod. If you weren't following Apple as a customer and fan, chances are you didn't know or care who Gruber was. I certainly didn't.
But Gruber wasn't the only author. Arron Schwartz invented it with him, and Aaron Schwartz was helping out an early Reddit a year later. Again, I think you vastly overestimate Gruber's role over actual use in popular sites, such as Reddit, and later Stack Overflow.
> well, that coupled with the fact that markdown has a catchy name. one cannot deny that. that helped too.
I won't deny that at all! I think that probably has more to do with it than Gruber's advocacy as well. :)
> at any rate, kbenson, i'm off to a school reunion
Enjoy! I've got another year before I have my 20th.
> we've hit the point of severely diminished returns anyway.
Agreed. We're really just refining our prior points but not making any headway in persuading each other.