rhythmvs

A pompous piece by an author who appears to know little of Plato, and less of software design, but nevertheless enjoys concocting absurd analogies like these:

    "Word’s 50-percent rule for applying styles is a descendent of the Demiurge, and just as much of a kludge."

Quite peculiar — and on topic — that the name of this excellent piece’s author is nowhere to be found…

Looks great! Will KaTeX support (c.q. integrate with) ASCIIMathML.js¹,²? AsciiMath is dubbed “TeX without backslashes”, or as “markdown for math”.³ (La)TeX input can become laborious, and the syntax gets difficultly readable, very rapidly.

With AsciiMath syntax⁴ (and Unicode!⁵) you can write δA instead of `\delta A`, ½ instead of `\frac{1}{2}`, ((a,b),(c,d)) instead of `\begin{pmatrix}a & b \\ c & d \end{pmatrix}`, &c.

¹ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCIIMathML ² http://www.asciimath.org ³ http://boolesrings.org/krautzberger/2014/08/10/asciimathml-t... ⁴ http://www1.chapman.edu/~jipsen/mathml/asciimathsyntax.html ⁵ http://www.johndcook.com/math_symbols.html

What’s Markdown™? it is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? that which we call a Standard By any other name would smell of squeamish ego

Dawkins is of a different caliber than someone of the likes of Jacob Bronowski. The latter mathematician-poet, evangelist of science while Blake expert; the first, well, maybe a fanatic, but surely profane. O tempora, o mores.

You nailed it! I am a typographer by profession, and I know exactly what you mean. The trouble with most light-markup languages is indeed their very limited document model and set of node types — basically an html subset, just good enough for blog posts, and, at best, source code documentation.

I’d rather take inspiration from something like the Chicago Manual of Style: we need many types of lists; more levels of headings/sections and control over their formatting; plates and figures; there are many types of “blockquotes”, etc. Poetry and drama are just some of the more difficult cases. How far must one go, or what, for example, should we do with things like Apollinaire’s [calligrames](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligrammes)?

As for your use cases: Besides AsciiDoc’s “verse” and Skriv’s support for literal line breaks, z.m.l. too takes these into account. For drama, there is Fountain.io’s domain-specific light-markup for screenwriting.

Very interested in your research and software. Do have a look at my (premature draft) light-markup [concordance}(https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/l...), and feel free to add.

Fair enough. But then again too bad Gruber gets all the credit (and consequently the privilege of nomenclature), while the late prodigy Aaron Swartz at least was his underacknowledged co-inventor.¹ I don’t think Swartz would have agreed on such a lock-in.

¹ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/001189

Happy to read there is some interest in “Markdown 2.0” or “lightweight markup, next generation”. With adoption by big outlets like Github and StackOverflow, and dozens of static site generators built on plain text source files, marked-up in Markdown syntax, Markdown is becoming a _de facto_ general-purpose document _editing_ and _storage_ standard. With the advent of fast client-side parsers, soon it might even substitute html as a document _exchange format_, too (at least for some use cases).

But there is no official spec, development of the syntax grew stale (from the start, thanks to Gruber)¹, and hence the language heavily suffers from fragmentation²: people want to be able to do more with light-markup, so they build extensions, or fork the language altogether. The troubles with Markdown are discussed in various³ places⁴, John MacFarlane built a formalized comparison tool⁵, but as of yet, there is no joint effort to cooperate on a lightweight markup standard.

There are a few interesting projects that dare to forsake Markdown and try their luck: Fountain.io⁶ (a domain specific light markup language for playwriting), SkrivML⁷, Strictdown⁸, and z.m.l.⁹

Then there are, of course, the many predecessors of Markdown, which prove that Markdown (or light-markup in general) is not the imprescriptible privilege of its self-proclaimed benevolent dictator for life, and some of which are still widely used in various communities: Setext (1992), AFT (1999), Grutatxt (2000), AsciiDoc (2002), MediaWiki (2002), reStructuredText (2002), Org-mode (2003), Textile (2004)…

We need an extensible lightweight markup language of sorts, a “lxml”, if you will, and we need to work on it together.

If we want ever to succeed in establishing a true standard light markup language, the big challenge is not only to focus on extensibility, but also to reconcile the various existing and future syntaxes, and take care of backward-compatibility (with plain Markdown), as much as possible. As mentioned by quite a few commenters here and elsewhere, weeding out conflicting syntax should be the first thing to do.

For starters, I begun a concordance¹⁰, listing the various delimiters and patterns used by competing lightweight markup languages. (Very rough draft, though, and need to think about a way to formalize the data, to make more accurate comparisons, and consequently, better decisions on the syntax of a future xlml.)

¹ http://blog.codinghorror.com/the-future-of-markdown/ ² https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources ³ http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2012/07/30/why-markdown-is-not... ⁴ https://medium.com/the-future-of-publishing/495ccfe24a52 ⁵ http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html#what-are-some-... ⁶ http://fountain.io ⁷ SkrivML ⁸ https://github.com/jakwings/strictdown ⁹ http://www.z-m-l.com ¹⁰ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/l...

Strictdown looks thorough: well-done! Added to the inventory of Markdown parsers and resources.¹

SkrivML² is another thoughtful take on lightweight markup, next generation.

¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/ ² http://markup.skriv.org/

The options for wysiwyg Markdown editing are few; they’re listed here.¹ Rich text editing for Markdown, still is an unsolved problem.²

¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...

² https://github.com/quilljs/quill/issues/74#issuecomment-4294...

    > Wow, how did I not know that?

To keep track of the fascinating and rapidly evolving Markdown ecosystem, I maintain an inventory¹ of Markdown dialects, editors, parsers, stylesheets, various tools, etc.

Kudos on Mkdown.com! It’s been added to the list.²

¹ https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources ² https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources/blob/master/m...

Fenced code blocks do come through as expected — complete with syntax highlighting. Well done!

One suggestion though: I expect my code blocks to not wrap — they’re in <pre> tags, after all. The stylesheet should have them rendered either with horizontal scrolling, or with overflow.

Compare e.g. http://gist.io/11118629 with http://www.mkdown.com/11118629

I had a look at your website and you write about interesting topics. I’d like to keep track of that.

It appears, before the rebuild, you had a feed @ http://mkaz.com/rss.xml — which is gone. I guess the Lanyon web server doesn’t generate atom or RSS feeds out-of-the-box?

That’d be a pity, while a Web based on Markdown+Git+WebSocket (or something alike) still is a long shot…

If you’re looking for an open source, self-hosted, webbased plain-text editor, that supports Markdown, reST, and LaTeX, and has Git integration too: just stumbled upon https://notex.ch/ — quite impressive work. Doesn’t look as nice as Prose.io e.a., but even the GUI is well-done.

Yeah, just stumbled upon it the other day. Impressive indeed. Markdown, reST, LaTeX, project-based file management, Git integration… One author, >2000 commits in under a year, actively maintained. Some devs are just these brave silent workers…

Plus, open source: https://github.com/hsk81/notex

A student of mine (Graphic Design major) made his master thesis on this topic. He devised a pictograhic signage system, developed a “disaster kit”, all items consistently “branded”, wrote and designed a survival manual. All well-thought and scrupulously executed. Cum laude.

    - http://cargocollective.com/sjaakboessen/NOODPAKKET
    - http://sjaakboessen.blogspot.be/2013/

This will not be an offering to the general public? While logged in into Twitter, the page reads:

    @myhandle does not have access to Twitter Analytics. If you're a publisher, developer, or advertiser, learn how to get access.

Interesting. I wonder if the ellipsis (…) changes how that wording is being interpreted by the user. Maybe we’ve been accustomed to the idea that … indicates an action is being performed by the application (Loading… — We need to wait.), whereas ! expects us to perform an action (Let’s play! – The app is waiting.) The UX of punctuation…

Except that “moving off Github” seems to have been becoming a meme that’s all over Twitter. When slander hurts your business, what do you do?

Upvote for your beautiful formulation and analogy.

What you are referring to was coined by Kant as “transcendental”, as opposed to “transcendent” — there’s theological/mythological/naive metaphysics and there’s abstract/logical metaphysics. The respective practitioners of those are a very different kind of believers. Unfamiliar with that essential difference, yet another party (mainstream scientocracy) is strongly averse to any kind of metaphysics and denies everything that is not touchable matter. They look at cloning the brain and will have difficulty to find the underlying structure of the mind.

Would love to see what you’ve been working on.

Meanwhile, I took the liberty of browsing through your .zml demo’s¹. I can say your manifesto² got me intrigued. Do keep me posted!

¹ http://www.z-m-l.com/ ² http://zenmagiclove.com/marchforth/march-forth-manifesto.zml

I’ll have a closer look at Pagebox.es

Long time ago, I mused¹ about these kind of things, then worked like mad on devising an implementation. Meanwhile, a side project I’ll take up again, one day.

I love the idea of data blogging.

Thinking more along the lines of what Freebase was doing (before Google smothered it), what Fluidinfo² originally intended to do, and what Silk³ seems to be doing best, right now.

¹ http://rhythmvs.tumblr.com/post/19750973162/hello-world ² http://fluidinfo.com ³ https://www.silk.co

Immediate sharing of raw data (with the world, or restricted to one’s peers), instead of going through the tedious process of information packaging through text, words, written description or synoptical graphics — that’s the future of our open Web. When anyone can create and update the underlying raw data, there can exist infinite summarizing views, syntheses, charts, text, all drawing their own conclusions.

Pushing and syncing strings is a solved problem, as are atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability. Powerful visualization tools are being made, too. The View and the Controller are taken care of.

The unsolved problem remains: how will we empower users to relate those strings, to have them turn data into information, and information into knowledge? How will we enable the many thousands of non-tech domain experts to create their models? How will we devise the Model?

Probably because you inject &nbsp; (no breaking spaces) instead of regular word spaces — so lines can’t be wrapped.

Also, the editor does not accept accented letters (Ä Ö Ü ä ö ü etc.), no Greek (Δεν Έλληνες), in short no Unicode, and not even full ASCII (common punctuation marks like — –).

It seems the app is listening to keys and basically re-implementing the whole typing input — which means you’d be in for some very heavy very low-level stuff (support for all of the 128k Unicode codepoints)…

I guess you’d had to do such a workaround to wrap the lines yourself, and move them up steps-wise, one line at a time (instead of the native scrolling behaviour). Though I really like the typewriter effect, one could ask if that isn’t at a very big expense (both in implementation effort and multi-language support).

The idea of the app (and it’s adequate name) is nice, though: stripping down even the most basic editing features (cursor moves) effectively forces one to focus on the writing at hand. Love it.

JWD looks nice! Hope to see this evolve into a great option for online writing.

Just wondering: do you plan on supporting Markdown? If not: is that by design? Plans on any formatting syntax whatsoever (considering ePub is the main target export format)?

I’ve been working on a Markdown stylesheet generator which would have you do just that — unfinished side project, though.

Have a look at my inventory¹ of Markdown editors (both native and web based), parsers, stylesheets, etc.

[¹] https://github.com/rhythmus/markdown-resources

Sure, but it’s neither portable across platforms, nor user friendly (for non-techies).

Imagine managing a collection of photos (or a mixed collection of multiple file formats, like scans of receipts, and pdfs with invoices) in something like Dropbox: no access to hidden low-level metadata blocks, etc., let alone easy editing. Not to speak of cross-platform support.

File names are always visible and editable, and they’re easily parsable.

I discussed such objections here: https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629#problem-metadata-p...

A file naming convention (lightweight markup) that would allow us to store structured (meta)data right inside file names. Obviously inspired by Markdown and CSV.

We could then build lean, database-less asset management applications, while the user data (i.e. the files and their metadata) would always be portable, across platforms.

Take for example:

  J.M.W. Turner | Rain, Steam and Speed | ···· 1844.jpg
  W. Blake ···· | Newton ·············· | 1795–1805.jpg

as compared to the clutter we now must deal with:

  _IMG00123.JPG
  Turner_-_Rain%2C_Steam_and_Speed_-_National_Gallery_file.jpg

My practical use case: take snapshots of my incoming receipts, bills, etc., name the jpgs using the proposed file naming convention (including fields for VAT, net amount, etc.), put them in Dropbox, build a parser and accompanying GUI to edit file names (and their corresponding metadata; have total amounts etc. being calculated in real time), drop a link to that (web app) interface to my accountant.

It’s just an idea for HN Idea Sunday; I did a somewhat more detailed write-up:

https://gist.github.com/rhythmus/11118629

Something similar is used by https://peerlibrary.org/ on their homepage’s background, except that over there the pattern is dynamically being animated — to great effect.

Thanks!

By the way: I’m very curious about your “zen markup language” in the make. Got some unfinished work in my drawers on “the best possible tool for writers”, too. Some more research, wireframes, and a few drafts on an _extensible_ markdown-like lightweight markup language. E.g. this little discussion: https://twitter.com/rhythmvs/status/423123272809455616

I sympathize with the idea of poet-turned-programmer. Maybe have a chat?