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Comment by m-p-3 | Hacker News Reader

> Do you want a markup language that doesn't require memorizing esoteric symbols but uses words instead?

I mean there isn't a lot of symbols to remember, and between symbols and words, I find symbols better to read when dealing with plaintext while words would get in the way.

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If I have to write "paragraph" at the start of every paragraph I'll immediately start looking for some kind of a meta markdown tool to make it easier to write.

Maybe some processor that allows you to write

Yeah! Then italics could be foo, etc. We could then give this variation a cool name, like "hypertext markup language".

Yeah, but then somebody would come and say, "when you write foo, what you really wanted to do is to emphasize", and so you'll write foo instead, and leave the italicizing out as an implementation detail.

Implementation details still have to be implemented. Someone else might come along and figure that different documents may want to interpret "emphasis" differently, and while we're at it, why not make it composable? They may design a DSL for that, and give it a cool name too, like "cascading style sheets".

Then someone else would say "I really hate people" and add <blink>

Then they can really tell the world about how they feel with <marquee>.

Those are compliant HTML5 tags, right?

They were never compliant, in any version of the standard.

I used to participate in a chat room that allowed a limited subset of HTML, and one of the tags was <marquee>. I played around with this a lot and discovered that you could nest marquees and make (very) limited ASCIImations. This culminated in someone making a ASCIImation parody of Finding Nemo. Good times.

AI will never reach human ingeniosity

I didn't know what that did so I googled "marquee html", they have a nice little easter egg for it. It's been a while since I've seen anything like that from google

Then someone else will come along and not understand it, and wonder why we don't have content, styling, and logic all in one place. He will write some script on a napkin in a coffee shop, but spill some java on it. An implementation will be made, but the spilling won't stop, not even after it reaches RAM.

But also allow abbreviations like foo</> or foo</> or <em/foo/

Want some PTSD? Imagine having to write "paragraph" at the start and "/paragraph" at the end of every paragraph.

From the glorious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook :

   <chapter xml:id="chapter_1">
     <title>Chapter 1</title>
     <para>Hello world!</para>
     <para>I hope that your day is proceeding <emphasis>splendidly</emphasis>!</para>
   </chapter>

Yeah. I have issues with Markdown but this is worse.

Personally - I'm always blindsided by paragraph and newline behaviour - and bullet/numbered lists seem to never work intuitively. I know the internal logic is consistent but it's never made sense to me and I can never recall it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Dumbdown is designed with future editors in mind that would always have autocomplete. Added that to the FAQ.

https://github.com/treenotation/dumbdown/blob/master/README....

Very true, considering that symbols are easier for those who don't know English.

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