> When I gush about rST to other programmers, this is the objection I hear the most: it's ugly. To which I say, are you really going to avoid using a good tool just because it makes you puke? Because looking at it makes your stomach churn? Because it offends every fiber of your being?
I like my Markdown documents to be nicely readable in source form. Because that's what I'm editing so being readable helps, and it's also what I read most of the time.
I don't think Markdown is perfect. I have gripes. But it's "good enough", and damn near everywhere already so it's "in the fingers", so to speak.
> Markdown doesn't have a uniform extension syntax or native support for pre-render transforms.
Well no, but "Markdown" is also a standard with more implementations you can shake a stick at, whereas most of the alternates mentioned n the article are basically just a program written in $lang, and that's it. I think some do have a spec document, but also don't really have complete alternative implementations, so it doesn't really matter.
> Well no, but "Markdown" is also a standard with more implementations you can shake a stick at
This ubiquity comes in large part from its lineage. Gruber based Markdown on the established cultural standards in raw text emails. The people who quickly adopted it where doing so based on familiarity.
I like my Markdown documents to be nicely readable in source form. Because that's what I'm editing so being readable helps, and it's also what I read most of the time.
I don't think Markdown is perfect. I have gripes. But it's "good enough", and damn near everywhere already so it's "in the fingers", so to speak.
> Markdown doesn't have a uniform extension syntax or native support for pre-render transforms.
Well no, but "Markdown" is also a standard with more implementations you can shake a stick at, whereas most of the alternates mentioned n the article are basically just a program written in $lang, and that's it. I think some do have a spec document, but also don't really have complete alternative implementations, so it doesn't really matter.
And I get the point; for my own website I have this ... piece of art ... to transform some of the HTML: https://github.com/arp242/arp242.net/blob/master/_plugins/ma...
On one hand: eww. On the other hand: it's not strictly needed, hard to do cross-platform, and has been working fine for a long time now. So whatever.