Landeau was writing in 2012. It;s changed a bit since then.
Right - but the core of the @karlnyhus’s argument was that Markdown took hold on iOS in the early days of the iPhone, and got traction then:
4 years or so without useful RTF support can do that. And in that early environment, it wasn’t uncommon at all to be trying to move files back and forth between apps - which required a more universal format. That’s important when you note that Landau was writing about ONE app coming onto the scene in 2012, not “the floodgates opening and tons of RTF apps showing up.”
Once a file format gets traction like that, it can be tricky to dislodge. I mean…look at things like x-callback-url. It’s (IMHO) not really a good way to move data between applications on iOS, but it’s gotten lots of traction since it was one of the few ways available to do it in restricted environments like iOS.
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One pattern I’ve noticed is that folks criticizing the modern use of markdown tend to be plenty technical. They typically have no problem parsing HTML or a DOM.
Therefore they miss a key benefit of markdown.
Markdown makes the structuring and styling rules of a document transparent.
Because it’s plain text, it renders basically the same anywhere.
Compare with a rich text file, especially one using tables and figures. You can’t open a Word file in Pages without breaking something, or a WordPad file in Wordpress’s rich text fields.
For the technically-minded, this is a software flaw. The rich text apps should be better, they say.
And they know that ultimately they’ll be savvy enough to figure out the import-export hoops they have to jump through if they want to recover some ancient rich text file.
Markdown, however, obviates these issues. It’s like a “right to repair” technology. You don’t need to worry about whether the next rich text app is going to implement the styling (or tables or figures) the same way. And moreover, you can see the contents yourself, to verify that everything’s correct.
Anything that abstracts away that plain text nature might gain a variety of conveniences and features, but it also becomes more black-boxed. That’s never a problem for today, but it’s always a problem ten years from now.
Also, XKCD:
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Phew, that’s a long read and I agree many valid considerations. My impression was that Knut went too far down the path of use cases that have outgrown its usage for writing for web, when the bulk of that work still hasn’t changed and for my entire writing team at our agency, Multimarkdown or GFM:
- saves them from getting hung up on things like whether an H4 looks better than an H3 in the CMS to how the heck do I code footnotes again? Which are infinitely more difficult in html than markdown
- keeps our prose content consistently styled and structured (and thus our designers happy)
- saves me the developer from having to step in between those teams to sort it out or fix incorrect semantics later on
For the 15% of needs outside of the core multimarkdown syntax I just build dedicated blocks for them to use in between such as: callouts, image galleries, embedded videos, data tables so they’re not wedded to HTML tables.
And of course as mentioned above, overlooking the use cases of note taking.
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Except when it doesn’t. People use markdown because they actually want rich text or else they just use literal plaintext.
The argument is missing the fact that markdown has spawned different versions and that means some of your styling may not render at all. Rendering the markdown in different apps yields different results. Also, if your actually trying to get a specific style rendered you may have to faff with stylesheets.
I certainly don’t think that markdown has made things any easier to get the final result. If we’re only talking about writing, well all editors allow plain text. The difficulty is that people using markdown do want rich text as the final output and that can be way more hassle than using ms word in the first place.
There may be problems with RTF, but markdown hasn’t solved it, it has just spawned a new set of problems.
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In my experience, that’s actually not the case. For example, if you type plain text into Word and copy/paste it into another editor, it sends over a fair bit of HTML along with the plain text.
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Not if it’s plain text. I have no trouble copying plain text from ms word into a plain text editor.
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There used to be a special MS Word command to copy plain text to the Clipboard, on both Mac and Windows.
There were also two Export or Save As commands for plain text, one with line breaks, one without.
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I’ve worked on a ton of websites where people copied otherwise-unstyled text out of Word into a WYSIWYG (WordPress specifically) and had it insert positively obscene amounts of HTML into the text.
And that’s the sort of thing I’m getting at. If it takes a special command to do it, it’s not plain text. 
This may be better in current versions. I just remember lots of problems in the past.
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Rich Text is wonderful.
WYSIWYG
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At the risk of putting words in @ryanjamurphy ’s mouth, I believe you have missed his point.
If one opens a Markdown file in any text editor it will look the same. And the formatting code is plain for all to see.
Open a Rich Text file in a program other than the one it was originally written in and it will very likely look different. And as the formatting code is hidden it will not be obvious why.
I recall that once upon a time the Mac and Windows versions of Word didn’t even give the same results (I do not know the situation at present as I do not use Word on macOS).
Markdown is a tool. Clearly it is not the right tool for everyone. But for some it is.
People write in Markdown because they want Markdown.
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Just a nit. I agee that markdown brings (much appreciated) transparency to the structuring and styling rules to put specific elements onto a displayed page in a specific way. It also does so overwhelming in an easy-to-understand way. I’d be hard pressed however to allow a slip that could imply that markdown, as a text markup syntax, allows one even a modicum of control over how content is structured on a document page, for example by comparison a markup syntax such as LaTeX. Markdown suffers in this respect from the same issues as its father/mother HTML does.
What you likely mean to say is that folks who use markdown do so because they do not want the overhead associated with RTF or HTML or LaTeX or other variants of markup syntax that allow one to translate ASCII TEXT → formatted text.
–
JJW
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This is not my experience and I did this yesterday.
But with the proliferation of different markdown formats, this is a moot point. The formatting may be obvious for basic stuff, by try Ulysses Markdown XL or Multimarkdown. Or open an Obsidian document that uses a plugin. You might see the plaintext, but I doubt you’ll understand all the code. On that level HTML is transparent as you can see the code in plaintext.
But that is not they end of the thought. People use markdown because they want to render rich text. That’s the whole point of using markdown. People want rich text not plaintext as the final format. And as soon as you want rich text you bring in the overhead that that creates.
Plaintext has been with us from the first computers. In the old '80 word processors you highlighted the text and assigned it bold, italics or underline. The computer put some hidden code in so that upon print the style was rendered. As time went on people wanted to see the formatting live so editors like ms Word rendered the text style live in the document. As people wanted more and more features more and more bloat was added to apps like ms Word. It then required some training to use to full effect because of its feature richness.
Along comes markdown an amazing simple system for styling your text in plaintext. But what follows? Well people now want to see the style rendered, which Obsidian, Bear and other “plain text editors” now do. People also want footnotes and images and blockquotes, so now we have multimarkdown, and pandoc markdown. Markdown is following the same track as plaintext did forty years ago only it is much less mature and requires more hands-on involvement to get the end result.
Both storylines have the same two principles:
- People want to write in a simple text environment.
- People want the text rendered to rich text at some point.
This quote has hit the nail on the head for me. People don’t want the overhead associated with rich text. However, if you want rich text, you’re going to get overhead and if you don’t want rich text you wouldn’t be using markdown either.
All editors allow you to write in plaintext, including ms Word. When it comes to rendering all markup languages have overhead. MS Word has overhead in that you need to learn how to style your output and render it. Markdown has overhead. It needs something to tell the render engine how to render the markup. Whether this is stylesheets (so hey, lets learn css so I can style my documents), or apps like Marked or some other method, you soon run into overhead. The great Donald Knuth who invented Tex to separate text from style ended up creating a massive overhead to create styled documents.
My problem is that as soon as you need anything above bold, italic and underline (although markdown doesn’t even underline), markdown’s overhead is worse by far. Need a header or footer, perhaps a page number or a logo in a particular place and markdown becomes a massive headache. Even page breaks or section breaks are problems. These requirements I have mentioned are part of nearly every work document that people need to produce on a daily basis. Branding items, footer information, header detail. In nearly every case a rich text editor is better by far, because of the simple fact that it is further along the evolutionary track than markdown. In thirty years there’ll be a new “markdown” as this one will have bloated. The bottomline is that if plaintext really was enough there would be no rich text, but it clearly isn’t enough.
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I realize I may be the exception here but, personally, I almost never use a structured plaintext format such as Markdown because I want to render rich text. Instead I‘m using it because I want to semantically enrich my plaintext in a simple way.
Like in this example, I want to clearly indicate text sections as headings, quotations, comments, and maybe add labels, tags, citations, links, etc. – all in a way that‘s machine- and human-readable while still keeping it as plaintext.
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Some people will want formatted text as an output choice, and they want to control that directly.
Just like some people prefer to write CSS and HTML, while others use tools like RapidWeaver or Blocs.
Or how some folks like to work on their car, and some let a mechanic do it.
It really isn’t that hard to understand.
What is hard to understand is why some people think they know what other people want based on their own needs, without considering other folks may have other needs. Or simply just other preferences.
By all means use the tools that work for you. But don’t use absolutes to ascribe to everyone what you prefer.
Cheers!
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But surely that is still creating something what is visually rich text? Be it the use of colour or italics or highlights, you are still looking to see your text in some rich format rather than plaintext. I would agree with you that for some the text may never be rendered into a completed document that is rich text, and also that keeping the source in plaintext has tremendous value, and yet we still want something that visually allows us to distinguish between different parts on the text in a rich text/styled manner.
Having the semantic plaintext elements richly formatted is indeed very nice to have (esp. for clicking links), but personally, I‘d not consider it a requirement and I would also cope without that. And I like working with the raw Markdown text. Having both at the same time is, of course, ideal.
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Agreed! @svsmailus spends a lots of words arguing against something that no one is forcing him to use. (But he keeps the discussion going which, I guess, is not a bad thing for a forum). 
It is dangerous to speak for others (so @svsmailus correct me if I get this wrong), but I don’t think that is the point he is making. I think he is pointing out (in the spirit of the article that I shared), that the majority of people (who do not hang out in tech forums like this one) want rich text and even those who like markdown, usually but not always, want to render final documents in some rich text format. I know I do, which is one reason I find MD problematic. It creates overhead and friction and inevitably I have to do clean up of articles after rending and exporting to rich text. And, adding to the complexity and overhead are programs like Obsidian that require plugins for any type of more “complex” formatting beyond just text on a page.
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You’re doing it, too (arguing against something that no one is forcing you to use).