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.

▲

chrismorgan 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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

▲

dpark 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What’s wrong with the link syntax and what would an alternative be?

▲

evnp 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Anything that doesn't force you to remember arbitrary ordering - square brackets first? Or parentheses? It's the textual equivalent of plugging in usb upside down.

An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link.

	▲	dpark 6 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think it’s a natural outgrowth of the way links are commonly provided in plaintext, like so much other markdown. > The details can be found at my website (https://example.com). The problem with this is that if you want to render this “pretty”, there’s no way to know whether the link should be “my website” or “website” or even the whole sentence. So you add brackets to clarify. > The details can be found at [my website](https://example.com). There are certainly alternatives but I don’t think any of them are more natural, or memorable for that matter.
	▲	simonkagedal 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Someone (maybe on this site) suggested to think of the bottom bars of the square brackets around the linked text to kind of frame the underline. Somehow worked really well for me, haven’t forgotten the syntax since.
	▲	setopt 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> An alternative would be to simply use square brackets for both clauses of the link. For comparison, Org-mode uses [[LINK][DESCRIPTION]] instead of [DESCRIPTION](LINK).

▲

PaulHoule 4 hours ago | parent | prev | 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.

▲

TimorousBestie 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To my memory, people had been using [link](url) and similar styling for a long time on old web forums and even BBSes.

Be glad they didn’t adopt Everything2’s “pipe link” syntax: [link|url]. Or maybe it was [url|link]? It’s been well over two decades, I don’t remember anymore.