[misthop]

> The impact of Markdown becomes clear if we plot a random sample of content websites. (Disclaimer: the data is made-up, based on my perception of the state of the web)

It makes sense that your perception of the web has driven you to create a new tool and market it with a think piece. But to expand that to suggest you have effectively realized and filled a new vector space in the web is excessive

>That sparse area just beyond the limits of Markdown is of vital importance to the web. These websites are not only a joy to read but also the ones that explore the web's possibilities, embracing the medium and evoking a truly web-native feel.

>Currently, these websites are outliers created by individuals who care deeply about the reader's experience or by companies willing to invest extra effort. We need more of them.

Interesting to me that you have added "focus on this paragraph" coloring to your site. I'm not against that in principle, but you have placed it farther up the page than I prefer to read and scroll. So you care deeply about my experience, have created a whole tool to inhabit an area of web design that you think is undeserved, rationalize it based on feels, and, for me, deliver a poorer experience to show it off.

"The Website Wasteland", as you call it, is a good thing if this is the result of populating it.

[metalliqaz]

well put, and I had thoughts just like this while reading the linked article.

I find that most of the use cases in that 'wasteland' would be made better by reducing the fluff and focusing on content. In my younger days, I chafed at the restrictions of Markdown and similar tools. However I now appreciate that the results are almost always easier to read.

[josephg]

Eh, maybe that's excessive for you and the kind of writing you do. But I think the author is right - there's plenty of valuable writing where being able to customize the page more is valuable.

The most obvious example to me is academic articles - where you need footnotes, figures, algorithm blocks, appendicies, math, numbered sections, and so on. Markdown doesn't support any of that stuff and latex is horrible on the web. It would be great to have something with support for those features, but that also supported HTML output.

But, there's plenty more examples where being able to make richer content than markdown supports is super valuable. For example, Bartosz Ciechanowski's blog is incredible:

https://ciechanow.ski/gps/

Doing anything like this in markdown is hard. You're kind of fighting the tool. The ideal tool would support custom components + custom styling - which aren't supported at all by markdown.

This whole comment thread is weirdly down on the article. I suspect most people have simply never come up against markdown's limitations while doing technical writing. They're quite severe whenever the output of your documentation needs to be a rich website or paper, not just a documentation file in a github repository.

[gglitch]

Had the same thought. It’s not that you can’t get an index out of Pandoc, it’s that it’s a bridge just slightly too far unless you’re really committed, and then you have a long road ahead of you.