-12

・ ❄︎・❆・❅・❆・❄︎ ・

  • they/it

12.10.3.1 Interesting Cases of Automatic Semicolon Insertion in Statement Lists


i  wish i could properly explain just how bad markdown is.
(and i wish i had some good alternatives to recommend)


by using markdown, you're locking yourself into an almost "proprietary" system. there's a specification (CommonMark) but it's ridiculously complicated, and most implementations aren't entirely compatible.
(especially with popular extensions like "github flavored markdown")
trying to write your own parser would take an unreasonable amount of time and effort, also

so: if you have some markdown text which was written for a specific parser, and want to render it in a different environment, it might be really really hard to find a compatible library there. (and don't forget, you have to deal with embedded html tags, too!)

a while ago i started (but never really finished) writing my own cohost frontend, without any frameworks or libraries (other than for markdown)
parsing and rendering the markdown was by far the most difficult part, and i never managed to make it work perfectly
(i used the same markdown library as cohost, but needed to do  a lot of things differently to avoid several MB of dependencies)

anyway
it's‥ kinda concerning, that every post on this site is locked behind such a difficult format...

(edit: oh, i forgot to talk about the syntax itself! basically, most/all of the features could be implemented in simpler and nicer ways, without all the annoying quirks of markdown. we just need to abandon that horrible mistake and create something new)


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @-12's post: