Comments on: Faster blogging through Markdown

By: Ryan B

Ryan B — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 19:27:39 +0000

I was all for this when I saw this plugin. I am not the world’s fastest typer and don’t always trust the RTE. But the way some things are done make me uneasy.
As somebody else said, you have to stick with this for life. People (who don’t know the syntax) will get the dashes for lists but will get confused with the bold and italic markings.

By: Rudd-O

Rudd-O — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:18:57 +0000

Well, from my point of view, Markdown is pretty good. The cheat sheet for markdown fits in one screenful, while … have you ever seen a cheat sheet for HTML? HTML authors also run the risk of writing invalid HTML. And the greater-than/less-than signs are definitely in an awkward spot on the keyboard.

By: David Russell

David Russell — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:54:09 +0000

Any theoretical speed advantages of using this are outweighed by the speed disadvantage of having to learn an entirely new markup system. I can look at basic (X)HTML formatting and tell you what the end result will look like - I couldn’t make the same promise for Textile or Markdown.

Besides which, LiewCF’s point stands: you are locked into using this plugin, and Wordpress, for the rest of your life (or at least, the lifetime of your blog). Sure, Markdown-formatted posts presented without the Markdown plugin will be readable, but they will lose all formatting (therefore one is less likely to want to read them).

By: m0n5t3r

m0n5t3r — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:15:47 +0000

unfortunately, Markdown is not a very good choice… or I’ve only met bad parsers until now (including the one at wordpress.org/extend/plugins):
* the way it uses indentation is inconsistent (you _may_ indent your lists, and I’d rather do that because it improves readability, but then you risk having them identified as code)
* the formatting syntax is reasonable (I’ve seen much worse), but quite not at the level of elegance the Trac/MoinMoin wiki syntax has
* the url syntax looks funny
* lists formatted like this one are parsed into a total mess (again bad indentation processing)
* poor nested list support (have to change the marker, instead of simply indenting stuff at the appropriate level, and then can’t really indent things to make things visible because of the 4-space-indent-means-code thing…)

Oh, and of course, once you’ve chosen one of these alternative markups you would have to stick with them… or get a smart plugin that can tell the difference (textcontrol should do, it has a per-post custom field that tells it what to employ for rendering, it would be hard to automatically determine whether a bunch of text is Markdown, Textile 1 or 2, HTML or some wiki-style syntax)

Maybe I’m too much affected by the Python mindset about the indentation thing and the decision to make Markdown like it is now was actually reached after a lot of thinking ( a lot of drinking and a lot of thinking).

By: Ben M

Ben M — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:59:03 +0000

Too bad the link above is for the version bundled with Turbocharged. Almost all of the Turbocharged plugins are available for free from the developers' websites, such as Markdown at michelf.com.

By: LuckyLily

LuckyLily — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 14:17:23 +0000

this look like a useful plugin, just hope things could b much more easier than this….in dealing with html…of course..

By: Shayne Power

Shayne Power — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:29:43 +0000

I disagree. While it might look a little strange if you have the plugin turned off, it is definitely _not_ unreadable. In face, that is the whole point of markdown.

From [daringfireball.net][1]:

> The overriding design goal for Markdownâ€™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 itâ€™s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdownâ€™s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdownâ€™s syntax is the format of plain text email.

I am assuming that you were able to read this post, marked (down, not up) completely in markdown syntax.

[1]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/

By: LiewCF

LiewCF — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 05:55:07 +0000

one of the reasons I do not use this kind of plugin is because my blog have to stick with it in the rest of the lifetime. Else, the post is unreadable.