Markdown's parser seems to be a fascinating anomaly: a specification that consists entirely of exceptions and corner cases.

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metalliqaz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

lol this is a great wording for something I've not been able to express before

I sometimes wonder... is it Markdown's specification chaos the reason for its success? Maybe it was just barely enough spec to be usable but also small enough to allow anyone to make an implementation that seemed right. No qualifications to fail. Thus, it proliferated.

The xkcd[1] problem is a darn shame, though. At least CommonMark exists for people who want to point to a "Standard"

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/

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chuckadams 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah I ultimately can't hate markdown, but it really was just specified more or less as "whatever markdown.pl does", and markdown.pl was not exactly the most rigorously engineered thing. Even bbcode of all things has more predictable structure to it. The commonmark/pandoc guy now has Djot, which is supposed to be a bit more sane, but I get the feeling it's probably too late :-/

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TimorousBestie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Markdown is definitely a case of “worse is better” and it helped that it was half-canonicalizing ASCII formatting workarounds that had been in common use for decades.

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chrismorgan an hour ago | parent [-]

… except its link syntax. That is an abomination that had never existed and should never have existed.

	▲	PaulHoule 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My feeling overall is that I can't get into flow writing Markdown, there are just enough things wrong that I never feel completely comfortable while doing it. It seems that in the HTML 5 age there is some subset of HTML which should be completely satisfying for anyone. Maybe it is custom components that work like JSX (e.g. <footnote>) or something like tailwind. Editing HTML with one eye on a live view is more pleasant for me than anything else. Every kind of rich editor that looks like Microsoft Word (esp. Word!) comes across as a dull tool where selections, navigation, and applying styles almost work. There's got to be some kind of conceptual problem at the root of it all that makes fixing it like pushing around a bubble under the rug. I want to believe in Dreamweaver but 2-second latency to process keystrokes on AMD's best CPU from 2 years ago and the incredulous attitude Adobe support has about the problem makes it a non-started [1] [1] if I ran an OS failing to update the UI in 0.2 sec gives an immediate kill -9 and telemetry of the event will get you dropped out of the app store not much later. I'm not saying rendering has to be settled in 0.2 sec but there has to be some response that feels... responsive.
	▲	dpark 14 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		What’s wrong with the link syntax and what would an alternative be?