|
|
|
|
|
|
by woodruffw
1699 days ago
|
|
|
I don’t know about these restrictions — they feel pretty excessive in a world where every engineer I know uses a terminal that can render Unicode and (at least) 256 colors. Plus, they usually have more than 72 (or 80) columns available. In my mind, the thing that makes Markdown a nice format (in contrast to something like ReST) is that it decomposes gracefully — the formatting indicators correspond pretty closely to the conventions that email and other plain-text mediums use. The fact that it converts to HTML is just a cherry on top. |
|
|
Such as, say, just for the sake of argument, when you've been awakened at 2 am by a pager, have travelled an hour to the colo, have a multi-switch KVM wired to a cabinet of otherwise headless boxen, several of which are embedded / dedicated devices with no package installation or updates possible, several of which support only serial terminal access (possibly given an equivalent access over TCP/IP or USB), and for which the output standard is an 80x24 terminal.
This might include ILOM, IPMI, or similar protocols.
There's too much RF in the colo itself to make a phone call, let alone support wireless or mobile data.
In such a circumstance, relying on anything but 7-bit ASCII text becomes really dicey.
Unicode has over 144,000 characters presently supported with more being added constantly. Systems without ongoing OS support (such as the six year old Android tablet I'm typing this on) simply won't have the new hawtness^Wcuteness installed, and I'll be looking at some variant of ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯. Which in context won't be especially useful.
Documentation in MS Word, DOCX, PDF, PS, or ePub will be simmilarly opaque.
Documentation in strict HTML ... without dependencies on images, CSS, or JS, may be useful, if I can aim w3m or lynx at it. (And I can always simply view the source.)
Documentation, like lifeboats, fire-extinguishers, and aircraft emergency slides, is intended for use in the least favourable, not most favourable conditions.
Your high-powered, graphical, UTF-8 / Unicode lastest-motherlovin-codeset Retina-display monitor should have no issues in taking 72-character-wrapped text and unfolding it to longer line lengths.
That 15 year old bit of embedded kit corporate's been too fucking cheap to replace or swap out when the universe is melting down, not so much.