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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

The thing this oversees is that the interface is important, simpler is not worse, it can in fact often mean better. For example while docbook may have some technical, the user experience for someone who just wants to write some basic stuff is absolutely horrible.

If I imagine beginner-coding me, the first thing I would ask for example is why the hell not just use html by that point. Markdown is a thing I could peesent my non-technical parents unrendered and they still would be able to read the content, just fine for the most part. Try that with docbook.

Now nerds like to pretend the more powerful format is automatically superior. It isn't. Markdown is sucessful because it is so barebones and opinionated and because it forces a focus on the content over formatting. If that is what you need markdown is perfect. If it isn't, go for Latex, HTML+CSS, Typst or use InDesign or whatnot.

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> opinionated

Markdown is the opposite of opinionated; nearly everything in the original spec can be done in more than one way. There’s two separate syntaxes to do headers, links, italics, bold, and three ways to do unordered lists.

Let me explain what I meant with opinionated:

Markdown decided for the users what the needed formatting options are, instead of giving them a bunch of tools that they could then combine in many different ways. The latter would be unopinionated as it doesn't force the opinions of the devs onto the users.

For example, why doesn't markdown have columns? Why do tables have to have headers? Etc. The reason is someone decided to do it that way on purpose.

Markdown is limited because it covers what its creator (single), needed for his blog. That’s it. Markdown was birthed as a single Perl script (with bugs that are still present).

Tables don’t have to have headers in Markdown. It doesn’t even have tables to begin with! Not in the original specification which still exists. But there are certain flavours of Markdown which add support for tables, and those may or may not require headers. Each flavour implements features of Markdown as it see fit, and those may or not exist in other flavours or be implemented differently.

> For example while docbook may have some technical

https://keenwrite.com/blog/2025/09/08/feature-matrix/

I wrote the feature matrix to objectively compare plain text-based documentation formats. How do DocBook's features compare against Markdown?

Markdown allows HTML to be mixed freely. Not all implementations allow it. But the whole point was allowing a fallback to HTML if Markdown couldn't do what you needed. So its not even an option of switching from MD to HTML/CSS, its just an addition when needed.

I know. And this was a good idea.

Simple is frequently superior.

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