commentaries about markdown considered harmful

[Jason Davies]

On 22 Nov 2013, at 18:52, bowerbird wrote:


> i don't talk about people behind their back.

>

>

>> https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52


# Medium Version

Not sure what your point is or can be, ultimately, beyond 'oh look, 15 
competing standards'  http://xkcd.com/927/

which is funny, sigh-inducing and normal. And certainly not a call to 
action (unless you don't get the infinite loop of it stirring you to 
action).

and various observations:

1) LaTeX is often deprecated by publishers in favour of Word because of 
lowest common denominators (that's how bad it is: you write in TeX then 
convert to RTF.) You want *that* world to make sense about markdown?
2) For some reason, the world struggles on with Word, but then, the 
world tolerates all kind of things.
3) People will use whichever version of markdown they like and sometimes 
hit snags. On the whole they will find it useful.
4) If you want a developed nerdy version, we have multimarkdown (with 
honourable mentions to others on your page), which is good for us so we 
can do what we do. And if it doesn't, we discuss and sometimes we get or 
we get to know why not.
5) If Gruber had decided to develop markdown further, he would be stuck 
on a mailing list debating fine points about double spaces at the end of 
line to produce an extra bit of whitespace, or annoying people by 
refusing to export to LaTeX and there's a guy who's written a script 
that does it but Gruber just broke it fixing the problem with footnotes 
attached to links so the entire community is up in arms all 177 of them 
and the rest of the world is using that broken version 
ohmygodhowdotheycope and Gruber is up late, and some of the markdown 
afficianados are annoyed because someone is wrong on the internet 
(http://xkcd.com/386/) and daringfireball would have been fun, shame he 
stopped it because he was doing markdown, how is that going, what 
version is it at? Oh 5, cool, and he's talking about scripts to check 
dates automatically now but he's running very low on plain syntax so 
he's thinking of using unicode symbols but there's a row because even 
though you can get them easily on iPhones, you can't on Android so the 
fanbois of the word 'fanboi' are offended and also ...

I like Gruber on daringfireball, personally. I suspect he does too.

We have multimarkdown. That's cool. Thanks Fletcher. And free or dead 
cheap (Composer). I can do all kinds of things then export to LaTeX. 
Cool bananas!:) This is what I dreamed of in the 90s with my Palm Pilot 
and a keyboard.


# Short Version.

Yeah, true. <deletes email>


-- 
Dr Jason Davies
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucgajpd/Academic/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/attachments/20131122/0f1a53cb/attachment.htm>