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Comment by masswerk | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, markdown doesn't offer much advantage over HTML, as writing a few short tags isn't much of a burden. (Even more so, if you use the old-style `b` and `i` phrase elements, which are apparently considered ok again. Personally, I still use `strong`, etc, which may be the most annoying feature for hand-written HTML. But this can be fixed by an editor shortcut.) Otherwise, a bit of server-side scripting for adding headers and footers and providing navigation is fine, but probably already outside the specs of "entirely handmade".

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For me the difference between writing markdown and writing HTML directly is that if I use the latter, I won't actually write the darn article. HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

I find the opposite. I almost never use Markdown unless forced to.

I find it much easier to remember

    <a href="https://foo.com"><img src="foo.jpg" width="300" alt="foo"></a>

that some

    [foo(foo.jpg)]

or is it

    (http://foo.com)[(foo.jpg)(alt=alt text)]

or is it

    [foo.com(foo.jpg) width=300]

or is it

    (foo.com)[foo.jpg](alt text)[::width="300"]

...? I can never remember the goddamn inconsistent syntax.

and is it 2 asterisks for bold, 1 for italic, or 1 and 2, or is it 2 and 3? With html it's

    <b>this is bold</b> <i>this is italic</i>
    <b><i>this is bold and italic</i></b>

Much easier to remember.

Same here.

Same problem for me.

these syntaxes now suffer the same problem that forum software went through... each has their own syntax and they are not usually compatible.

HTML, for better or worse, is the syntax we all know by heart and is universal.

I’ve never seen a markdown flavour with anything other than 1 for italic and 2 for bold. Emphasis and strong emphasis respectively.

I agree that the link to image syntax is easier to remember in html. That said, since markdown supports inline html you can always use that.

Go and use MediaWiki markup, then you won't be able to make that assertion any more. (-:

Hard to remember. <b> and <i> are easier to remember than 1 and 2 (or is it 2 and 1) and now I have to figure out how to escape a damn asterisk, and how to do bold italic. Too much stuff to figure out. HTML is easier.

I just write the article in the code editor, then go back and add the tags.

Seems obvious to me, but maybe because back when I was a journalist, that's how we did it. The tags (how and what varied by system) triggered chryons and video playback and other events.

> HTML is pretty bad for re-reading and editing, as the tags get in the way.

There is https://pugjs.org if you want to write html in a cleaner, concise way.

Eh. That’s just yet another templating engine. What I like about markdown is that I can use an editor (such as iA) with previews, highlighting and style helpers.

Is it similar to HAML? I just started using that at work and really quite like it for templating.

It's sort of a more pythonic HAML with good JS tooling is how I would describe it.

The "strong" and "b" tags don't mean the same thing, nor do the "em" and "i" tags. HTML, used properly, will tell you why the typography appears as it does, which means that the meaning isn't locked up in the typographic conventions of the day (which change, often making old documents confusing to read, and are not accessible). Markdown is lazy.

Technically they don't mean the same thing, but in practical reality, they almost always display the same way, which is what matters to most people.

They might display the same way, but they shouldn't read the same way, which matters a lot to users of screen readers.

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