Mastodawn

One thing I think people aren't talking enough about is how #genAI has made #Markdown as ubiquitous a document format as #XML was in the early '00s.

Of course the great thing for us programmers is that it is almost as poorly specified and ambiguous as #YAML.

We are so good at this standards stuff.

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MikeStok

@tastapod @PragmaticAndy In my opinion Markdown’s ubiquity is yet another example of “smart” tech folks taking a tool that was good for its purpose and gleefully applying it in areas where its weaknesses and limitations are the things many users experience most. Markdown is useful for small lists and documents, but if presentation or navigation matter then it is at best a mediocre target output for rendering.

I’m with Butterick on this one: https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/second-tutorial.html#(part._the-case-against-markdown)

6 Second tutorial: Markdown, templates, & pagetrees

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Daniel Terhorst-North 1d ago

@MikeStok @PragmaticAndy it's usually about least friction. To even look at e.g. pollen, I need to install a language, then another thing, and then I'm stuck in someone's editor (or someone else's editor plugin).

To use Markdown I need... a keyboard. Ditto YAML vs e.g. TOML or anything else. It's ugly, but it's easy ugly.

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MikeStok 1d ago

@tastapod @PragmaticAndy … and we wonder why software quality is so low.

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Daniel Terhorst-North 1d ago

@MikeStok @PragmaticAndy We can blame the users (us developers in this case) or we can do the work to make the 'right' path the easy one.

Exhibit A: password managers. When you make it easier for me to have something else generate and remember a strong password, people are much more likely to adopt it (including my 70-something in-laws).

Exhibit B: Ubiquitous biometrics and seamless secure enclave. Same in-laws login with their fingers or faces, oblivious to how much more secure this is.