| I've only skimmed over the links you provided so far, but why do we even need any of this stuff? Look at this recent show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19482280 It's plain text, would parse as valid Markdown for the most part but reads just fine - I didn't even realize that it was MD until someone mentioned it in the comments. Using Underlined Text
===============
Works as an effective heading (# in MD)
Leaving some empty lines also helped in that txt file
* and these
* type of lists
* work just fine.
Why not just use a .txt file with two or three special format codes: one to make a URL clickable, one to embed an image (with a specified width, clicking goes to the full image), and (maybe? - this is getting kinda complex) one for math.On the one hand there are barebones formats like what I described, and on the other there are complex ones like MD and the ones you linked to. The issue with all of the complex ones is that they provide leaky abstractions. With MD you get a compiler that does MD->HTML, and you provide your own CSS file. OK, now you have a neat looking table. But what if you want to make a cell span two columns? You're screwed, you either need to look up complex nonstandard syntax for that (may as well use HTML at that point) or just convert the whole table into HTML (now you have 80% MD and 20% HTML in your file). But if you have a .txt file, you just delete the | pipes you drew. Sure it's a bit more tedious, but it works and is 100% consistent. And what if your CSS gives table header rows a yellow background, but you want one column of a specific table to be red? Again you need nonstandard syntax to mark that table with a class and link it to a CSS rule, or you just convert the whole thing to HTML and add an inline color="...". Leaky abstraction. In this case a .txt helps by removing choice and placing limitations - you can format the whole document as a text file but with clickable links and inline images, and if you need more styling then you can use HTML. Or write in MD and compile into HTML, if that's what you want. MD and its other formats are in a half-between position where you often use the abstraction but also occasionally have to fall down to the lower HTML level, and I just don't think that it deserves a place as a standard format for web browsers. |