You can include arbitrary HTML tags in Markdown at any place you need them.[0] I am not aware of any Markdown tooling that does not support this.

So, no, Markdown is not holding me back. It is perfectly capable of what the author claims it isn't.

[0]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

Markdown is the minimum viable product. It’s easy to learn and still readable if not rendered in an alternate format. It’s great.

For making PDFs, I’ve recently moved from AsciiDoc to Typst. I couldn’t find a good way to get AsciiDoc to make accessible PDFs, and I found myself struggling to control the output. Typst solves all of AsciiDoc’s problems for me.

But in the end, no markup language will make you write better. It’s kind of like saying that ballpoint pens are limiting your writing, so you should switch to mechanical pencils.

I love this post. While I don't mind markdown for quick notes which require basic formatting (headlines, bold, maybe a link), time and time again, I've found myself having to build parsing libraries and scripts for specific use cases just so the content can be interpreted correctly.

Take for example my blog, which I've had since 2016. It has been rebuilt into various systems over time and every time I had to migrate, there was a manual step of going over all posts and making sure they're displayed and interpreted correctly. In my last and current iteration, I've designed the system so that content is also stored with some hierarchical information (from html) like <section>, <article>, <address> etc, only applying styling to it when rendered.

I don't think we should stop using Markdown, but when something requires more than 200 lines of introductory text, more semantically enabled source feels necessary.

I use Org-mode w/ GNU Emacs for all of my blogging(shameless plug: amitav.net). I like Org-mode because it's easy enough to write, looks nice enough, can be exported in quite a few formats, and the code block handling is chef's kiss. It supports quite a few languages and has a feature I've seen in no other editor before, where you can chain together code from different code blocks, and evaluate it, inside of the document itself. I tried out a few different blogging platforms with first class Org-mode support ([Blorgit](https://orgmode.org/worg/blorgit.html) and [lazyblorg](https://karl-voit.at/tags/lazyblorg/)), but they ended up taking up a bunch of time to set up, so my current process is just manually exporting my Org files to HTML, then using rsync to send them over to my server, then I have a Ruby script which just appends an index to the bottom of each file and serves it. I find Org-mode a lot more expressive and natural to write than my previous blogs which were in Markdown.

> Markdown Lacks the Structure You Need

I feel like this article makes a lot of valid observations, but then wraps them with a false dilemma.

If it had tried to convince the reader of understanding what formatting needs are required before choosing a format, I would have entirely agreed with it.

Instead I'm left feeling mildly offended, and disagree with it.

Been constantly using it for ~10 years and it works great. I read the article and its not incorrect, but its also kind of arguing that markdown users have problems that they themselves would say they don't have. If you need something else, use something else. With all that said, great title, they convinced me to waste ~3-5 min digging in.

Markdown is meant for less technically skilled users and cases where you just want to type something with a bit of structure and not bother with full html. Making universal claims of it being bad ignores the proper user cases for it. Author can write HTML as much as he wants, but don't tell the world that MD is bad.

By suggesting DITA as a valid alternative to Markdown, for any use, this has so completely lost the plot that it blows up whatever credibility Brian might have on the subject. It's disappointing, because I know of Brian and otherwise respect his work.

Short of writing in raw Postscript, I can't think of a more completely different set of strengths, audiences, and applications. I had to get to a company with more than 5,000 employees, 20 product lines, and 5 required i18n locales to find one where the overhead, god-awful ergonomics, and half-broken tooling of DITA were appropriate for the scale of the work _and also_ resourced enough to paper over every miserable facet of its implementation.

If you're using Markdown today _at all_ for a task, DITA isn't appropriate for it. If DITA was appropriate for the task, you never would've picked Markdown to accomplish it to begin with. Don't waste your time with it either way.

Really weird to see this person mention MyST as a form of Markdown, and then go on to talk about reStructuredText as their first example of a markup language "that gives you more control over structure than ... markdown".

The whole point of MyST is to provide a markdown-like alternative to rST. It literally has directives, roles, structural semantics, etc. It just doesn't have the unlearnable syntax of rST and the so-called governance of docutils (the de facto rST parser) (see e.g. discussion on https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues/8039 and linking issues)

I'm working on a HTML replacement right now. If I am to believe the author, it would solve her issue (I don't think so). But I don't know if I want to "share". Can I patent it? Good luck with that.

Going off-topic now, sort of.

The Open Source I see just isn't serious. We lose the right to have an opinion about a technology, to steer it, as that right is mediated by money, and it just evaporates, unless you can set the norm by being a major user, like a tech titan.

Markdown is special because we as developers are the users! Though tech titans dictate what we shall use. As developers we are seemingly in a concentration camp where others set the rules, and there is no escape, unless we surrender our work in the name of love, in the presence of those who absolutely don't, government included, and whose basic mode of operation is to make the profit on our work. It's just legalized demoralization, if not outright stealing.

If you're from a developing country you know what I'm talking about. There is no way to be creative and get paid. You are a beggar, no matter your talents. The end result is that human creativity remains untapped. That is the price we as a community pay every day. Heil the rise of AI, so we don't need each other any longer, and the abuse can stop ;-

There's crimes everyday, and we normalize them, if they are done by the trusted and verified, that talk about merit while they hire f*cks to do their bidding. As a community we are a harem, and they come to rape us, err, give us pleasure, whenever they feel like it, and expect us to love it. Well, don't you love your new toys? That is who we are. And we therefore tend to repeat the cycle in our homes, as "men".

In the end the framing as a technical issue is what marks us. It's is the safe zone, where we can deny the real issue, and cope. If you're a member of Nation Procrasti-me, you know what I'm talking about. Nation Procrasti-Me, Where Life Is Denied. And rent-seeking is the truth.

F*ck, how did we get so cooked? We shackled ourselves, duh. We are infants, or else outright dumb, dumb enough to give away our life force, for new toys to play. Worse, we dictate others do so too. That's when we stand on the side of the abuse, confidently like a toddler that just spread his shit all over the place and radiates "how good was that!".

This article doesnt consider Typst, which IMO ought to be the first port of call if Markdown isnt sufficient for your needs.

I use markdown because it's easy to read without rendering. All of the alternatives in the article seem worse

If I wanted more structure, I'd just write html; or mix html into the markdown.

Pandoc lets me do things like generate libreoffice or microsoft word documents from the markdown, using a reference document for styling of headings etc. This also gives me good enough control to generate OK looking pdfs. It's not LaTeX levels of control, but it's much easier

I don't want to do extra work to hypothetically make things easier for an LLM.

Feels like a great argument...for, I don't know, a bunch of moderately technical high-schoolers who were somehow raised on markdown instead of Microsoft Word and want more power?

No, seriously, who is this for?

The author seems to forget that markdown is just an extension of html. If markdown doesn't provide something that html does, you just write it in html and it will be rendered correctly.

I'd also argue that the limitations of markdown allow me to focus on actual content and less on the presentation. I have little use of all the features of a markup language if I can't remember how to use them.

Asciidoc corresponds directly to DocBook XML. They're two formats with exactly the same semantics.

We found Markdown with directives[1] worked well enough for our use case.

[1]: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/generic-directives-plugins-syn...

I don't agree with this article. I mean sure there's no standard but there is pandoc, and quarto, both of which fill the gaps this article claims. And I also don't write content for LLMs so I don't care whether they can understand it.

It's interesting to see how Markdown keeps getting more and more use, and even native Windows Notepad support!

> If you're writing a quick README or a short-lived doc, Markdown is fine. It's fast, approachable, and does the job. If you're building a developer documentation site that needs some structure, reStructuredText or AsciiDoc are better choices.

This is dumb. If I'm writing developer documentation I'm not writing it for a machine. And if the aim here is to expose it to a LLM, then the LLM needs to get smarter about semantics, not force us back to formats that are more technically complex to write and maintain in order to re-create 'the semantic web' - a flawed concept that has failed to catch on.

If the LLM needs context on content that humans don't need, the LLM needs fixing, not the content.

> With Markdown as your source, you can't easily go to another format.

File->Print->PDF.

Was that hard? (I admit it's still bizarre that Chrome puts 'Save As PDF' under Print).

(Apparently you can also go via LaTeX if you love a CLI)

It’s good to spread awareness (or just remind folks) that alternatives to Markdown exist. The right tool for the job depends on your circumstances. If I were scaling a docset for a team of contributors primarily consisting of technical writers, .adoc or .rst would be my preference. If I were scaling internal docs-as-code infra for software engineers, I’d use Markdown.

Certainly not holding me back. I can go from crappy notes on a notepad to a polished and branded PDF release including TOC, tables, images and formulas, info/warning boxes, lists, code snippets with syntax highlighting, header/footer, etc in literally minutes. What else do you need?

This is, personally, a controversial topic- I can take both sides of the debate in my head. I use markdown intensely and feel the deficiencies deeply, but wasn't able to see how there are real alternatives given the ecosystem (e.g. Obsidian).

I do think things are ripe for changes in this space.

I would like to point out that asciidork provides ability to get AST representation of asciidoc. It’s very nice package. Not the author but have used it.

https://github.com/jaredh159/asciidork

This is a timely topic for me. I'm just beginning the writing of a technical book. I plan to target epub/mobi. My research thus far has pointed to markdown -> html -> epub/mobi. If you were going to write a technical ebook would you use markdown or an alternative?

I love RestructuredText. My blog used to be on RST, because I hate markdown. I moved to Hugo and Markdown because I wanted to put out content, not fight the weird system that was Sphinx (My RST blog was running on it), and ablog, the Sphinx blogging framework didn't work with Furo, my favourite theme. I just use Hugo, and I use Claude to fix the css.

> Your content isn't just for human readers. Machines use it too. Your content gets indexed by search engines, and parsed by LLMs, and those things parse the well-formed HTML your systems publish.

Sounds like I need to start using Markdown!

Org is pretty good.

Markdown is the McDonalds of writing

The other options look like garbage tho

I've never struck any off these problems, and in order to use the tools he suggests I'd have to switch out the systems I use that just support markdown

I sometimes make documents that require more complex formatting, so I use html after 20 minutes fucking around in word and getting angry

Tried and trusted process

The whole point of markdown, really it's whole value preposition is that it has nice looking plain text. And don't get me wrong that is a hell of a value to many people, myself included. Yes it is a terrible markup language, And I would encourage anyone doing serious document work to use a language that provides better semantic structure. But I would also argue that all projects that try to add these structures to markdown are missing the point and destroying it by making the plain text ugly.

The paper makes the point that people keep extending Markdown, badly and incompatibly.

> Markdown Lacks the Structure You Need

The problem is, I always need more structure. Give me some YAML and time and I'll make hell (not a metaphor, I'll concoct hell itself on it).

Markdown keeps me honest.

Markdown won. Simplicity always wins. Markdown is now the de facto documentation format, for better or for worse.

is this a poignant satire about programmers?