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I wanted to quickly explain why school kids should learn markdown instead of MS Office, and ended up writing a major Epos on Markdown vs obsolete writing formats:

ia.net/topics/markdown-and-the…

This is, I kid you not, about 1/6th of what I wrote. I'll publish the rest later.


Markdown and the slow fade of the formatting fetish

Notes on a revolution in slow motion.
Oliver Reichenstein (Information Architects Inc.)
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blaine
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blaine
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I really appreciate the critique of word, and the appeal to focused tools. I think a case can be made for a *very* minimal subset of markdown, but one of the challenges is that things can get out of hand very quickly when people start adding to the limited core functionality. You deal with this in the treatment of formats, but I think it's important to observe that markdown becomes a format whether we like it or not when it escapes a single system.
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blaine
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blaine
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in my experience (in particular, implementing and improving a CMS whose primary editing interface was markdown [not my idea] for Condé Nast writers and editors), beyond the most basic concepts like bold and italic, non-technical people really struggle with markdown.

I think this is because markdown _is_ html: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Gene…

I've talked and thought a lot about markdown, and I like to say that Gruber didn't invent it as much as he re-discovered it.

markup language

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
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blaine
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blaine
• •

html is hard to learn. Markdown is slightly easier, but e.g., link syntax is decidedly not obvious. Once we start introducing more complicated syntaxes, it goes sideways into a realm of total non-comprehension very quickly.

I think this is all in-line with your argument, but I guess I would add that it's maybe worth adding a giant warning sign that while limited, situated markdown can be great, it shouldn't be put in load-bearing situations that it's unsuited for.

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Oblomov
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Oblomov
• •
@blaine markdown doesn't even have a defined syntax for tables. It's way limited. A lot of comments here have recommended RST as a better alternative —personally I would go with AsciiDoc(tor). The same principles of simplicity and “structure first, layout after” apply, but you actually get a wide range of technically useful features at hand
@blaine
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