Almost completely pure way of storing ideas. With this I mean that you don’t store unnecessary data such as “background should be white” or “left page margin is 1.3cm”. It’s just text. What’s important is what it says + minimal markup.
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I wish browsers would support markdown out of the box, so you could open example.com/some-post.md
Presentation is left to the reader’s client. Do you want dark mode? Get a markdown editor/reader that supports it. Do you want serif font? Again, that’s client’s choice and not part of the document.
I remember when that is how the web worked. All that markup was to define the structure of the document and the client rendered it as set by the user.
Some clients were better than others. My favourite was the default browser in OS/2 Warp, which allowed me to easily set the display characteristics of every tag. The end result was that every site looked (approximately) the same, which made browsing so much nicer, in my opinion.
Then someone decided that website creation should be part of the desktop publishing class (at least at the school I taught at). The world (wide web) has never recovered.
There are four properties in an accessibility tree object:
name
How can we refer to this thing? For instance, a link with the text “Read more” will have “Read more” as its name (find more on how names are computed in the Accessible Name and Description Computation spec).
description
How do we describe this thing, if we want to provide more description beyond the name? The description of a table could explain what kind of information the table contains.
role
What kind of thing is it? For example, is it a button, a nav bar, or a list of items?
state
Does it have a state? Examples include checked or unchecked checkbox states and collapsed or expanded states for the <summary> element.
We’re getting closer to winter. I’ve got most of those preparations done. “Just” have to finish building the heater for my shop. My programming based project list is coming together: learn me some Rust, contribute some documentation to a project I’m following, look deeper into the potential of the Accessibility tree. That should keep me busy for a while!
It’s a simple and elegant way of covering 95% of document structuring needs, while being as close to readable plaintext as possible.
The vast majority of documents currently written in MS-word could just be markdown. The vast majority of web content could just be markdown. This would save the modern world petabytes of XML bloat.
If you need something fancier, either use a vector format or do fancy client-side styling.
Markdown is good. I use it when working in the company since the format is ubiquitous. I do writing my blog posts with Markdown (Hugo for the curious).
But personally, or working with a bit more niche team, for writing personal documentation I prefer Asciidoc [0]. It has better syntax and have some nice functionalities like Table of Contents.
For personal notes, nothing can surpass Org Mode [1].
Eh, while Markdown is nice I think Dokuwiki’s syntax is infinitively better for any kind of text that ends up involving programming code. It also has a header syntax that makes sense, albeit rather cumbersome. And it also makes a proper distinction between italics and underline which are two different, standard typographical effects and not the same thing as Markdown seems to believe; and between ordered and unordered lists (let alone nested lists).
Just about the only bad thing is I haven’t been able to find an editor that supports it. Probably because, to my knowledge, no self-standing / independent renderer exists for it (the parser and renderer seem to be tightly integrated into the content manager).
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