Markdown development

Aristotle Pagaltzis pagaltzis at gmx.de
Thu Mar 25 10:08:56 EDT 2010


* Seumas Mac Uilleachan <seumas at idirect.ca> [2010-03-24 01:30]:

> Elastic tabstops would certainly make my pseudo-table much

> cleaner. Would make creating such a table a breeze without

> requiring special markup. Is this idea actually catching on


Yeah, elastic tabstops solve this problem in a fundamental way.
The problem is they’re a boil-the-ocean solution, they require
support in almost all tools that will touch the document in
question. That’s a very high activation energy barrier… you’ll
need a catalyst to get them adopted, eg. a new OS/platform that
fully supports them from the get-go – essentially you need an
Apple to throw their weight behind it.


> like Sony Beta - a better solution that no one will buy into?


Myth. Betamax was inferior to VHS in significant ways, even if
it had an obvious advantage in picture quality and cassette size.
The market decided that people prefer VHS’ mix of good and bad to
Betamax’ mix of good and bad. End of story.

It’s like saying webmail is inferior to desktop mail clients.

Regards,
--
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>


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