Hot take: Markdown was nice back in the day when in-browser editors sucked for the most part and we just wanted to get things done and didn't mind the little bit of noise it adds to content. It was an act of satisfysing.
In 2024 though, there is no need to have to deal with markdown. There are decent editors that are far nicer to use which support rich text without the need to see past the markdown noise. Any company serious enough with their app should invest in creating/using a rich text editor
Is there even real interoperability outside the basic syntax? There are so many flavors of Markdown with different extensions and probably incompatibilities...
There are also tables, different link-types, lists-enhancements, how html is handled in different context.. Yesterday(?) I even saw a flavor adding LaTeX-like functions. Markdown is a very wild garden of different options.
> Hot take: Markdown was nice back in the day when in-browser editors sucked
I don't think markdown came from that at all. It gets used that way a lot, but the point for me (and IIRC the point of it from the start) is that the format is just plain text that can be up-sampled to something a bit prettier where desired. It can be edited by hand, it can be understood by eye in its pure form, it isn't as verbose as other text-only options¹ meaning it doesn't distract from the content as much², it can be edited/viewed anywhere plain text can, etc.
It wasn't intended for web-based editors, web-based editors just started using it because it was preferable to them than other options at the time (HTML, BBCode, …).
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[1] including HTML and anything XML based
[2] yes, this makes it less expressive than other options³, but that is often a compromise worth making
[3] I'm thinking of looking at AsciiDoc, which predates MD and for the basics is very similar but supports much more, for my own scrawlings (nothing currently published), but TBH once I get beyond basic MD I'll probably want to be more opinionated (and disagree with existing opinions!) so will likely end up making my own MarkDown+ and tool to pretty it up.
You called it "markdown noise". I called it "easy to see if I actually bolded the whole word or I forgot to bold the last character" or "easy to see if I also underlined the space after the word".
Except a lot of people (like myself) really dislike rich text as a format. Doesn't really play nicely with git. When was the last time you wrote rich text by hand?
We've even had word processors for over 40 years, why would we suddenly need mouse support to write rich text?
Editing rich text without mouse has always been a thing, Markdown isn't something that suddenly created some fancy new rich text without mouse experience.
In 2024 though, there is no need to have to deal with markdown. There are decent editors that are far nicer to use which support rich text without the need to see past the markdown noise. Any company serious enough with their app should invest in creating/using a rich text editor