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by timeflex 435 days ago
Sad what things like Markdown has done to people. It's like they forgot about all the amazing semantic markup of HTML 5 to create strong relations between their data. I'll take a Lexical editor with SQLite to store my data any day.
3 comments
scelerat 434 days ago
HTML5 is a long way from the simple hypertext document format embodied in early versions of HTML. It is that way from necessity: how the web and applications built upon it using HTML have evolved. HTML started off being very simple and very accessible. One just had to grasp the concept of a tag, and that tags had to be nested and closed (sometimes), and you could make a hypertext document to serve on the WWW. One influential cohort of users, application developers, ran hard with HTML, pushed it to its limits, and continuously revised it to be an application rendering language. Anyone who merely wanted to write a hypertext encountered a complex and growing language spec.

Markdown emerged to fulfill that "simple" hypertext document role. If you're writing READMEs and blog posts, you probably don't need more than that. And I think it's more accessible (certainly less error-prone) than HTML for most people.

If you need richer semantics, HTML5 is available. And if semantics are important to you, you're probably still using HTML5 as a rendering layer and your actual semantics are processed, stored and delivered in layers much more purpose-built for that.

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kstrauser 435 days ago
I don't think it’s that so much as that all that extra context is overkill in lots of situations. If I'm writing a blog post or a Slack message or my own internal-use note, I probably just want some lightweight formatting. Making rich semantic connections wouldn't have a good payoff for the extra work in those cases.
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HankB99 434 days ago
> I'll take a Lexical editor with SQLite to store my data any day.

Do you have tools that do this or an example?

I'm pretty happy with Markdown and mkdocs (on Linux) to manage and format my notes. VS Code does a pretty good job with this providing both a preview and facilitating linking between documents (both file and heading links.) I'm always open to something better.

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