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Comment by vhanda | Hacker News Reader

> A formal spec also doesn't help much for apps to use this format. There is not a huge need for portability between to do apps, and for most users to do items are ephemeral and not something that needs to be archived and revisited. Even if an app adopted this, being tied to a plain text format would likely hinder feature development, including the ability to sync across multiple devices. Beyond that, different to do apps use different systems of categorization and tagging, so really in practice I doubt this will become any kind of standardized format.

I disagree. I maintain a rather popular plain-text-based app [1] and the formal spec makes this something very very easy to add support for. Infact the only thing that could make this even easier is if there was a way to verify my own implementation.

[1] https://gitjournal.io

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Yes, you could add support for it. To what end? Do you think the usage will be high enough to justify the effort to implement and maintain it?

Even imagining the ideal world where every to-do app implements this, portability of to-do items between apps just isn't that big of a problem. There isn't a big need to move long lists of to-do items between apps.

And in the real world, this won't be implemented perfectly. You'll have the App A implementation, the App B implementation, and so on. Look at Markdown. You'll have headaches migrating your to-do items automatically and in the end, most likely, you'll just end up copy and pasting them. It's not that hard and old to-do items aren't that important to the vast majority of people.

This sounds a bit defeatist.

Yes, it won't be perfect at first, but there is always a chance of reducing the barrier to entry. The lower it is, the more % of users / developers / apps are going to use it.

It's not defeatist. As I said, I just don't think, even in the optimal scenario, that it is a goal worth achieving. Personally I'd rather software developers focus their time on more worthwhile features.

What is worthwhile can vary widely. Like the quote that people use only a slice of Word, yet often different slices.

Not sure I agree. I didnt know about gitjournal until vHanda's post, but immediately saw how it could be a replacement for my use of Google Keep (which I use when I'm on the go vs at my laptop). And there was already an exporter for Google Keep. I'm guessing that exporter benefited from a spec being available.

Your point about "if you're the only one using it, just use it" does apply, but sometimes we do find ourselves being more successful than we originally expected and defining things via a spec is not a bad thing.

yes

To add to this, many markdown apps do support TODOs, but they use their own format. e.g. Bear uses

    - [ ] Unchecked
    - [X] Checked

If there was a widely-accepted standardized markdown format for TODOs you could write them in one app and then they would display properly in others.

Foam Notes also uses that same markdown format for checklists. I think that Markdown is a pretty good format for notes and is already used by enough apps.

Microsoft Azure DevOps does too.

I'm a happy gitjournal user, and I want to +1 this. I'm already using it for checklists as plain markdown, and the format is pretty similar. I can see a lot of value to this as a semi-markdown compatible extension or second app sharing the codebase.

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