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0 pointsbluGill2y ago0 comments

Too annoying to write by hand. also too annoying to read the raw text. Markdown is easy to write by hand and looks good enough without a viewer.

0 comments

James_K2y ago

This is an eminently solvable problem. I've been writing my personal website in a variation of HTML for a while now which is perfectly easy to write and read.

  {main
   {h1 Title}
   {p
    Paragraph 1.
    {{a {href google.com}} Here is a link.}}
   {p
    Paragraph 2, now with {b bold} text.}}

The nice thing about HTML/XML is that it's a clear data-structure, so you can essentially read it in any format you like and convert that to the underlying tree structure without much issue. That's why it's been so successful, basically the same philosophy as a lisp. Why someone would look at that and think "let's go back to a document with no clear structure" is beyond me.

lelanthran2y ago

You solved it with s expressions.

Replace the braces with parens and you can parse that into a tree with only a handful of lisp macros.

James_K2y ago

The braces are quite deliberate. Firstly, parens are used often in writing and it would be a pain to have to escape them. Secondly, it integrates much easier with the Scheme code of my site generator this way. I can write in a file, something like:

  (define (code-block file-name)
    {pre {{code {class block}}
          #(cmd "highlight" (thisdir (string-append "posts/" file-name))
                "-O" "html" "--inline-css" "--fragment"
                "--line-numbers" "--line-number-length" "3")}})

And it fits quite nicely with surrounding code. The mapping of these curly expressions to Scheme ones is relatively simple, though there is a special case for joining words to brackets.

  {a {b} #c #@d} => `("a" ("b") ,c ,@d)
  {a {b}c} => `("a" ("b") join "c")

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enriquto2y ago

Apart from the p tag, that gets annoying when you have long stretches of prose, I find plain html5 much less annoying than markdown. Moreover, tables and hyperlinks are clearer and easier to type in html5 than in any markdown flavor.

subtra3t2y ago

Easier to type? Sure, but I don't think HTML5 tables are easier to read than markdown tables

enriquto2y ago

Thanks to optional closing tags, html5 tables are quite neat:

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>first row, first column
      <td>first row, second column
      <td>first row, third column
    <tr>
      <td>second row, first column
      <td>second row, second column
      <td>second row, third column
  </table>

Does it get any better in markdown?

2 more replies

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James_K2y ago

This is an eminently solvable problem. I've been writing my personal website in a variation of HTML for a while now which is perfectly easy to write and read.

  {main
   {h1 Title}
   {p
    Paragraph 1.
    {{a {href google.com}} Here is a link.}}
   {p
    Paragraph 2, now with {b bold} text.}}

lelanthran2y ago

You solved it with s expressions.

Replace the braces with parens and you can parse that into a tree with only a handful of lisp macros.

James_K2y ago

  (define (code-block file-name)
    {pre {{code {class block}}
          #(cmd "highlight" (thisdir (string-append "posts/" file-name))
                "-O" "html" "--inline-css" "--fragment"
                "--line-numbers" "--line-number-length" "3")}})

And it fits quite nicely with surrounding code. The mapping of these curly expressions to Scheme ones is relatively simple, though there is a special case for joining words to brackets.

  {a {b} #c #@d} => `("a" ("b") ,c ,@d)
  {a {b}c} => `("a" ("b") join "c")

1 more reply

enriquto2y ago

subtra3t2y ago

Easier to type? Sure, but I don't think HTML5 tables are easier to read than markdown tables

enriquto2y ago

Thanks to optional closing tags, html5 tables are quite neat:

  <table>
    <tr>
      <td>first row, first column
      <td>first row, second column
      <td>first row, third column
    <tr>
      <td>second row, first column
      <td>second row, second column
      <td>second row, third column
  </table>

Does it get any better in markdown?

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse