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2020-10-19
<quote>Do you know how it would be parsed? I have no idea.</quote>
<p>
I've had this exact question countless times with markdown, for a
medium designed to be "readable" it is surprisingly non-intuitive to
write in. I have found myself reconsidering whether HTML is really
so bad to write by hand.
<p>
The most annoying part is probably closing tags and you don't even
need to write many of them. For example, <code><p></code> tags are
implicitly closed, the same with list item (<code><li></code>)tags.
<p>
In my other writings online I've moved away from markdown and I
really don't miss it. More than anything I've found my web documents
have benefitted from the more free-form nature of plain HTML.
<p>
Gemtext is small enough as to be unobtrusive, but I am not
enthusiastic about it like I am Gemini. I find myself feeling
vaguely opposed to the idea of further extensions to gemtext.
<h2>An Example</h2>
<pre>
a <pre> tag means preformatted.
no debate whether leading whitespace is trimmed because there will
be no more formatting!
</pre>
<p>
Consider the markdown equivalent and the potential for ambiguity.
<ul>
<li>a
<ul>
<li>aa
<li>aa
<ul>
<li>aba
</ul>
</ul>
</ul>
<p>
<a href="gemini://perplexing.space">Links</a> can be a little
verbose, but there isn't room for confusion about which is the URL.
Obviously I am being a little facetious with this reply, but I really do think HTML has been unfairly discounted in the last ~15 years. After being poorly extended and ill-maintained it was declared unfit for writing applications when the original design was for writing documents. If we really want substansive change we should focus on more cogent ideas and less "cool hacks" like markdown.