Comment by jabirali | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabirali | Hacker News Reader

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> Remember this: Markdown is all about HTML. Markdown has serious limitations and is very poorly designed in places, but it works well enough despite being so bad specifically because underneath it’s all HTML, so you can fall down to that when necessary.

Originally, this was the case, but I'd argue that modern MarkDown flavors have been separated from HTML. It's common to compile via other pathways than HTML now (e.g. MarkDown → LaTeX → PDF), and many implementations don't support inline HTML anymore (e.g. many MarkDown-based note-taking apps).

> I find that perfectly normal documents need to write raw HTML regularly, because Markdown is so terribly limited

Out of curiosity, what do you need it for? I write a lot of MarkDown, but haven't felt any need for writing raw HTML. Modern versions of MarkDown (e.g. the Pandoc variant) have native support for things like tables, LaTeX equations, syntax-highlighted code, even bibliography management.

These are the three most common cases that I find for needing raw HTML:

1. Adding classes to elements, for styling; admittedly this may be inapplicable to some visions of a document web, if you can’t write stylesheets.

2. Images. If you’re dealing with known images, you should always set the width and height attributes on the <img> tag, so that the page need not reflow as the image loads. Markdown’s image syntax (![description](src)) doesn’t cover that. (Perhaps an app could load the image and fill out the width and height as part of its Markdown-to-HTML conversion, but I haven’t encountered any that do this.)

3. Tables. CommonMark doesn’t include tables, and even dialects that do support tables are consistently insufficient so that I have to write HTML. For example: I often want the first column to be a heading; but I don’t think any Markdown table syntaxes allow you to get <th> instead of <td> for the first cell of each row.

Fair enough :). For the record, Pandoc MarkDown supports all of these via its extended MarkDown syntax. For the first you can write [desc](src){.test} to get a class=test attribute on the link, for example. For the second, you can write ![desc](src){width=50%} to set the image size. For the last, tables do automatically get <th> on the first cell of each row when converted via Pandoc. This is however not standard MarkDown but Pandoc's extended version of MarkDown.

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