> Markdown is already beautiful. We don't render it. We don't preview it. You read it raw, the way it was meant to be.
I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.
Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.
Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.
I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.
Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.
Agreed. I want my h1’s to be larger than my h2’s. That visual distinction is how I parse data faster. Flat markdown with no formatting feels like it’s missing the point of Markdown.
And are they really proposing that we ought to read italics and *bold* like this?
Edit: Oops. Looks like HN has formatted bold/italics for me. Italics should be bracketed with one asterisk and bold bracketed with two asterisks.
I don't want to be inflammatory or shallowly dismissive of other people's opinions. But I find this puritanical view surprising when we're talking about presenting markdown for reading by humans.
Take markdown links for example. In a terminal those should surely be rendered as OSC8 hyperlinks where supported: that gives actual link functionality, as well as being much more readable.
Or take markdown code blocks; to me it seems clear that they should be rendered with syntax highlighting, probably in a box or against a slightly different background color to set them off from the rest of the document. Triple backticks are for machines, not humans, surely? I don't think they're beautiful.
I don't know the history / lore of what is common mark vs non-standard addons etc. But github supports things like <details> tags; clearly it's no good just rendering that in plain text. A browser renders it well; not sure how to in a terminal.
Similarly tables should surely at least have padding added so that each column has constant width as you look down the rows, but promising to output it raw wouldn't do that since markdown itself has no such requirement. Which gets at my overall point: markdown is a format for capturing richer document data while writing; this should be rendered for humans to read.