Handcrafted HTML

Markdown sucks!

Now that the elephant is out the box here my more nuanced take: Markdown lacks severely as a format when used for publishing things on the web. Without consulting any data I think it is safe to assume that most of the writing online - especially by technically savvy people - is done in Markdown. Long gone are the old days when people where writing HTML by hand to customize their MySpace profile. This blog revolts against that. Every word are reading right now was placed with great care by myself between a "<" and ">".

There's no Markdown specification

I admit there's CommonMark. I won't go into too much detail about CommonMark itself except for the following: Markdown emerged without a formal specification. Instead, its rules were outlined by an accompanying blog post. Actual implementation details needed to be looked for in an accompanying script written in Perl whose purpose was - you guessed it - to transform Markdown to HTML. The result being that, due to the lack of formal specification numerous competing versions, so-called flavors, of Markdown exist. This ambiguity offers lots of flexibility to it's creators, at the cost of reliability (looking at you Slack!). Citing John Gruber the creator of Markdown regarding it's goals: Surprisingly that statement stands in contrast to the opening paragraph of the same article: Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid HTML.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

Now that the elephant is out the box here my more nuanced take: Markdown lacks severely as a format when used for publishing things on the web. Without consulting any data I think it is safe to assume that most of the writing online - especially by technically savvy people - is done in Markdown. Long gone are the old days when people where writing HTML by hand to customize their MySpace profile. This blog revolts against that. Every word are reading right now was placed with great care by myself between a "<" and ">".