AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics

Re:AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics by Aardwolf on Monday March 27, 2017 @07:51AM (#13966876)

Not a fan of markdown myself at least for comment boxes. Everything that uses markdown as input (which seems to be hacker news comments too) ignores a single newline as a single newline, giving you different output than what you see in the box you type it in, which is very bad for intuitive web comment boxes.

Lots of people make that mistake, making a nice listing with newlines in between but them it becomes an ugly single line.

BBcode from forums in the past worked better for comments.

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Re:AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics by shthed on Monday March 27, 2017 @09:14AM (#13967403)

I don't understand why they mess with newlines, what's the reason?

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Re:AsciiMath – An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics by Aardwolf on Monday March 27, 2017 @10:26AM (#13967957)

Somebody argued to me that it is to support editing like source code where you want a line length limit like 80 characters.

That is a very specific thing for source code editors. But bad for comment boxes. So I don't understand the popularity of markdown for comment boxes.

IMHO markdown should have done the opposite, make listening to all your newlines the default, and if you want to make it ignore a newline, end the line with a backslash or something like that.

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