Markdown Is Meant to Be Shown: Stop Hiding the Syntax (2021)

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Bear

#Office & Productivity #Word #Lifestyle 53 social mentions

Ahh, yes. I, as a developer, think Markdown is wonderful – simple even – so I use it all the time. It finds it's way into my applications and interfaces. The pure elegance is the stuff of dreams. Then I bring a client into their app for an onboarding meeting. When they see a bit of Markdown, they start to fidget, then sweat. "Will I be asked to perform these magic incantations?" they wonder. They feel a bit of queasiness but try to hold it back. Perhaps this will be ok. But, after about 10 minutes, I show them that `# Header` is how you make a header. Their disdain is now total...How dare I imply that a hashtag implies a header. This is hard. Then, I show them a link. "It's just like this", I say: `(https://example.com)[example link]`. "You'll get used to it." Finally, the client pounds his fists on the table. "That's CODING DAMMIT. WE PAID YOU TO DO THE CODING YOU *$$HOLE. I want it to be like...well...Microsoft Word." --- You see, my friends...the real problem here is that Microsoft Word is a nightmare but it is _the_ nightmare to which all other dreams are compared. And thus, sheepishly, I awaken, and install TinyMCE.

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Markdown by DaringFireball

> if I would take your copyrighted work https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ >Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source license. John Gruber's markdown is <i>unmaintained</i> (last updated in 2004), <i>free</i> software, which many people have contributed to to fix oversights and extend its capabilities. This is exactly how fsf is supposed to work.

#Text Editors #Markdown Editor #Markdown Viewer 88 social mentions