Good article. I also agree with his approach of taking Common Markdown and breaking it up into a core, and then extensions. That means parsers can be standards compliant while working in environments and situations where certain features don't make sense (e.g. something that takes in markdown and outputs to an programmable LED sign, won't need URLs, HTML, and so on just formatting).
I wish Hacker News had markdown.
Off topic question: Why has rich text fallen so far out of fashion? I really like Markdown, but why is it that Markdown is now so popular and richtext boxes that can display a realtime preview (e.g. bolding text, italics, etc) aren't. What is it markdown offers over that? Is it just transportability?
One nice feature is that markdown makes text annotations explicit and obvious. There's no hidden styling. Empty lines don't have a font size. Its obvious when a bolded region doesn't bold the spaces between words. In the Rich Hickey[1] sense, markdown is much simpler than rich text editing because all you have to worry about is the semantics of your text (this is a heading) and not how its actually styled.
Weirdly, its kind of a huge throwback to LaTeX. Thinking of markdown as a "modern, simplified LaTeX for the web" seriously hits the mark.
> Off topic question: Why has rich text fallen so far out of fashion? I really like Markdown, but why is it that Markdown is now so popular and richtext boxes that can display a realtime preview (e.g. bolding text, italics, etc) aren't. What is it markdown offers over that? Is it just transportability?
A very good question. I think it's because once you can type fast, having to take your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse to select text, apply various styles, add links, etc. is slower than just writing everything with the keyboard without raising your hands.
I think you're mostly right - I'd just add that perhaps the lack of (real estate) space on most mobile devices discourages wasteful and hard-to-henpeck toolbars.
Plus, as others have pointed out, there's that 1/2 MB entry fee. Expensive on transit and on local resources.
Maybe also a correlation with the kinds of people who write nontrivial text on their mobile devices, and are comfortable with in-line markup?
I don't need to use the mouse with Markdown. The keyboard is sufficient, and once you have a bit of practice it's easy and quick to use.
Additionally, I think it emphasizes the styles that are important in social media (blockquotes, code, bold, and italics) while de-emphasizing those features that are less important to it. The rich text editors, even on the web, all have a standard layout of buttons which displays all the wrong features first.
Rich text editing on the web is complex, Markdown is simple. Adding rich editing for something as simple as a comment box typically means adding something like TinyMCE: half a meg of JS to build the edit UI and attempt to paper over browser quirks and edge cases. Markdown is just a <textarea> plus a call to your renderer on the back end. It's offloading complexity to the user.
The reason I wouldn't use a rich text editor is it leads to "support issues".
It wasn't because the implementation was buggy but rather the fact the end-user thought it should behave like word and just copied/pasted stuff.
Rich text editors are more complicated and tend to have usability issues. I had to support one for a year with very, very average users who used the application infrequently.
Browsers don't have good controls for entering rich text.
So you're left with trampling over the input experience with a lot of javascript. It breaks things like the "it's all text" extension, and generally will only work for the subset of configurations that is tested for.
If browsers had decent html-editing widgets, it might work better. I've yet to see any form of rich text editing that doesn't lead to frustration (never mind works on mobile touch etc).
Google has an interesting solution for G+ -- they've broken plain text entry (and plain text paste of long texts) without giving any benefits of rich text entry. But I'm sure it's great if you live in a bubble where no-one's used an actual text editor, and gwt is the best set of widget anyone's heard of. Facebook on mobile (in a mobile web browser) is pretty awful too, if you try to use the completion-options for tagging friends.
Come to think of it, I'd only be half as upset with g+ if one could simply upload a utf-8 text file into all of the comment/edit boxes.
Partly simplicity and ease-of-use; partly probably so many users (and developers who are users) being burned by bad implementations of WYSIWYG editors.
I think GMail's is pretty decent, but the majority of rich text editors I've used on the Internet over time have caused almost as many issues as they solve when trying to write formatted text.
I wish Hacker News had markdown.
Off topic question: Why has rich text fallen so far out of fashion? I really like Markdown, but why is it that Markdown is now so popular and richtext boxes that can display a realtime preview (e.g. bolding text, italics, etc) aren't. What is it markdown offers over that? Is it just transportability?