Markdown Criticisms and Standards

Discussions critique Markdown's popularity, simplicity over correctness, lack of standardization, inconsistent implementations across products, and propose alternatives like CommonMark.

➡️ Stable 0.6x Web Development
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Keywords

JSON commonmark.org HN china.org ycombinator.com ASCII markmin.html HTML reddit.com fiddle.md markdown markup syntax gruber editor language variants tables elm html

Sample Comments

Vrondi Mar 14, 2021 View on HN

By the spirit of the thing, Markdown ought not qualify

ramses0 Apr 19, 2021 View on HN

Markdown? Markdown-ish? Something better than the foot-gun of markup currently supported?

reitanqild Mar 6, 2016 View on HN

Why markdown everywhere, don't we have better markup languages?

Evbn Oct 26, 2012 View on HN

No way. Markdown chooses simplicity over correctness. Fine for chat forums an Readmes, but in many cases correctness matters.

m463 Sep 12, 2019 View on HN

Why is markdown so popular? It seems so braindead.

jspthrowaway Oct 30, 2012 View on HN

Markdown is a specific implementation, a concept lost on the majority of the people in this thread.

Jenz Jan 20, 2021 View on HN

As if Markdown wasn’t dumb enough already?

cdubzzz Oct 25, 2016 View on HN

Oh yeah, limited options with Markdown. Hence the original comment (:

starbugs Oct 16, 2018 View on HN

Hm... Isn't that what CommonMark is for?

smoldesu Nov 27, 2021 View on HN

I thought the point of Markdown was having a style-agnostic markup language that can easily be converted to HTML...?