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Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by xigoi on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:31PM (#47630251)
For me, Markdown produces a lot of unnecessary cognitive load compared to other markup languages.

• I have to decide whether to use asterisks or underscores for bold and italic.

• I have to decide whether to use asterisks, hyphen-minuses, or plus signs for unordered lists.

• I have to remember all the various rules and edge cases about parsing.

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by mh- on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:40PM (#47630389)
> compared to other markup languages

I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages. Markdown is the only standardized one I regularly come across that I type by hand, these days.

What are you contrasting to?

As for Markdown specifically- the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and (). But that's just because I don't use it enough to have the muscle memory.

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by xigoi on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:50PM (#47630526)
> I think it would be easier for me to appreciate your comment if you named some of these other languages.

HTML? Also my markup language I created for myself, which is currently not published.

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by mkldd on Friday April 03, 2026 @03:23PM (#47630962)
my girlfriend goes to another school
Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by nickloewen on Saturday April 04, 2026 @01:43AM (#47636185)
I used to flip the link syntax all the time too. What finally helped me to remember it was noticing how I write links in plaintext emails.

In email, I naturally write things like "...on the example website (www.example.com)..."

Markdown keeps those () in the same place, and just adds the [] so you can delimit the visible text: "...on the [example website](www.example.com)..."

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by mschnell on Saturday April 04, 2026 @01:58AM (#47636263)
I remember it like this: If you squint the brackets around the link text make a rectangle and look almost like a button you can press. [Press here](to.go.there)
Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by klez on Saturday April 04, 2026 @04:27AM (#47637093)
> the only thing I regularly mix up is the syntax for links. I frequently reverse the [] and ()

I remember it as passing parameters to a function that requires an URL as an argument. Maybe it's not the most straightforward way, but it works for me

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by nxpnsv on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:38PM (#47630344)
1&2 just pick one, it doesn’t matter. 3 mostly you’re the parser… if you’re after accuracy there are better versions, but it sure is simple to read and write
Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by chrisweekly on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:34PM (#47630299)
I suggest trying Obsidian for WYSIWYG markdown editing. It beats heck out of typing it raw and eliminates that cognitive load.
Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by xigoi on Friday April 03, 2026 @02:52PM (#47630539)
I don’t like WYSIWYG editing, as it makes the formatting invisible.
Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by delecti on Friday April 03, 2026 @07:55PM (#47633934)
Then you might like Obsidian. When the cursor is in some bit of formatted text, it displays all of the characters. When the cursor is elsewhere, it just shows the formatted text.

In the worst case, the barrier to entry and exit are pretty low.

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by lolive on Saturday April 04, 2026 @02:15AM (#47636354)
Obsidian has 2 main advantages to me.

First you can switch from WYSIWYG to text editor instantly.

Then you have an outline where you can manipulate your “markdown blocks” [i.e title and its content] by drag n drop. Or extract a “markdown block” as a new note, and leave a reference where it originally was extracted from.

And then [the killing feature], it displays the content of a link, web link or internal link, as a [kind of] iframe, if you prepend a ! to the link.

Re:Why the heck are we still using Markdown? by GandalfHN on Saturday April 04, 2026 @05:32AM (#47637436)
Markdown gets dunked on for tiny syntax choices, but the bigger problem is parser drift baked into the format, so you can feed the same file to two tools and get different lists or line breaks. AsciiDoc is stricter, and heavier.

A lot of the load comes from the editor and parser, and if Markdown died tomorow, plenty of teams would crawl back to worse HTML habits.