HACKER Q&A
📣 vanilla-almond

Markdown – Arguments for and Against


I neither like or dislike markdown. I am indifferent.

However, it seems universally loved by developers. Any app missing markdown support - from note-taking, blogging, documentation, wiki, or a CMS - is dismissed by developers. (Or its inclusion is requested.)

Questions:

1. Why do you like markdown so much?

2. If you dislike markdown, what are your reasons?

3. Have you ever had non-technical users successfully adopt markdown in their workflow or in the tools they use?

My anecdotal experience with non-technical users: I have seen non-technical users forced to use it because developers insist on it. I have never seen non-technical users enjoy using it - tolerate it as most.

  👤 softwaredoug Accepted Answer ✓
I don’t like inconsistencies. One service has triple back ticks for code, another doesn’t for example. Another supports images, another doesn’t.

I don’t like it for long-form content. It’s good for notes and readmes, but i prefer asciidoc or similar for book chapters given the slightly higher amount of power and structure.

👤 dyingkneepad
What I like about it is that it's kinda everywhere, so I don't need to learn yet another documentation format for each project I work on. It's kinda like git: it may not be the best, but it's the standard and I have already learned it, so anything that's not git is less comfortable.

Also, I love the fact that my text editor (vim) knows how to interpret the Markdown tags and color/bold the text accordingly. I get meaningful syntax coloring on a text file. Yay \o/.

Regarding your last argument: if you need some kind of syntax formatting and you're not going for Markdown, what the hell are you using? Chances are that whatever you choose is worse because (i) the chances of users being unfamiliar with it are higher and (ii) the format is not a simple as Markdown.

👤 ezekg
Re: 3, Reddit and Slack have both successfully had non-technical users adopt Markdown.
👤 theandrewbailey
1. I like it because it automatically takes care of HTML tags. I was tired of remembering to manually open and close tags for paragraphs, links, lists, tables, etc. It made the tedium go away and let me focus more on authoring the text itself. If markdown doesn't implement a tag I'm looking for, I can drop it in where needed and not think twice about it.

2. I rather like it, due to 1.

3. I haven't tried pushing it. Does anyone non-technical enjoy using a markup language? In my experience, markup is hidden behind a rich text control of some kind.

👤 foobarbaz33
1. It does not need to be "rendered" with any special tools before reading it. There are some tools that may pass markdown through a "rendering" phase such as github's markdown viewer but it's pleasant to read in the raw format too.

Markdown is not the only option for a readable raw format. But it's somewhat of a defacto standard and gets the job done.

It's easy to use without formally learning it. I never had to "learn" markdown myself, just type some text, indent for code, done.

2. n/a

3. n/a

👤 nnurmanov
There is one thing I don't like about markdown format. When you send an email, you have to either strip off all the tags or convert to html. Any way to overcome this problem nicely?