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Comment by lelanthran | Hacker News Reader

> What it can't do (as far as I understand): complex layouts, precise typography, embedded binary content, anything that needs pixel-perfect rendering. Am I missing anything? What are the other limitations I should know about?

Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

This is a serious and major drawback of markdown, making it good for developers only. The average person does not want to render code.

Remove that one drawback, and it'll get even better adoption.

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> Multi-level lists, annoyingly, get rendered as code at the deeper levels because of the 4+ spaces from the beginning of the line.

Not so. You just need to be principled with your indentation, adding four spaces or one tab for every level of nesting.

  1. Here is a thing.

      - See, it works.

          Nothing is amiss.

  2.  If you want to align everything…

      -   Then it looks like this.

          Then it doesn’t seem so weird.

(You can leave or remove the two spaces of HN code formatting; zero to three spaces don’t matter.)

I’m pretty sure many Markdown implementations would turn this into a code block. Unfortunately Babelmark seems to currently be broken so I can’t test it.

The original spec says it should work, and it does with <https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus>, as with <https://spec.commonmark.org/dingus/>.

your markdown parser isn't compliant with commonmark: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#example-294

indented code blocks are leaf blocks, while lists are containers that take precedence

That's a "feature" of a specific renderer. I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked, and both kept rendering each line as regular text.

>> The average person does not want to render code.

> I just went 22 levels deep with Zed and Marked

Sounds like you're agreeing with me :-/

Or are you arguing that the average person is a programmer, using programming editors and JS libraries?

I don’t follow. Marked definitely isn’t a programming tool. There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code. That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

> That’s just an accident of whatever editor you might be using, not of others.

And that’s the main issue with Markdown.

> There’s nothing about Markdown that says nested lists should look like code.

Yes there is. The Common Mark spec, from 2014, says 4+ spaces indents are code. Nested lists go beyond 4+ indents pretty fast.

…as long as you ignore the context that it’s a nested listed under a less-nested list.

Also, note that CommonMark is not identical to Markdown. It intends to be a standard definition of the language, but may differ from the original definition and implementation.

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