[HN Gopher] Show HN: Dumbdown - A dumb alternative to Markdown
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Show HN: Dumbdown - A dumb alternative to Markdown
Author : breck
Score : 78 points
Date : 2021-01-20 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| shawnz wrote:
| I think this doesn't solve the problem it aims to solve.
|
| Sure, the symbols are gone and replaced with words, but does that
| make the special word required in a given situation any easier to
| memorize? The symbols in markdown were chosen to match the way
| people already write informal text online, so it is not like they
| are just pulled from space.
|
| And yes, it's true that with this syntax, you don't need to
| remember which order the brackets go in for links. But you still
| need to remember in which order to put the URL versus the link
| text, so the problem there is not fully eliminated either.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| > Do you want a markup language that doesn't require memorizing
| esoteric symbols but uses words instead?
|
| I mean there isn't a lot of symbols to remember, and between
| symbols and words, I find symbols better to read when dealing
| with plaintext while words would get in the way.
| andybak wrote:
| Yeah. I have issues with Markdown but this is worse.
|
| Personally - I'm always blindsided by paragraph and newline
| behaviour - and bullet/numbered lists seem to never work
| intuitively. I know the internal logic is consistent but it's
| never made sense to me and I can never recall it.
| hirundo wrote:
| If I have to write "paragraph" at the start of every paragraph
| I'll immediately start looking for some kind of a meta markdown
| tool to make it easier to write.
| rakoo wrote:
| Maybe some processor that allows you to write <p>
| lhorie wrote:
| Yeah! Then italics could be <i>foo</i>, etc. We could then
| give this variation a cool name, like "hypertext markup
| language".
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, but then somebody would come and say, "when you
| write <i>foo</i>, what you _really_ wanted to do is to
| _emphasize_ ", and so you'll write <em>foo</em> instead,
| and leave the italicizing out as an implementation
| detail.
|
| Implementation details still have to be implemented.
| Someone else might come along and figure that different
| documents may want to interpret "emphasis" differently,
| and while we're at it, why not make it composable? They
| may design a DSL for that, and give it a cool name too,
| like "cascading style sheets".
| SemiNormal wrote:
| Then someone else would say "I really hate people" and
| add <blink>
| terinjokes wrote:
| Then they can really tell the world about how they feel
| with <marquee>.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Those are compliant HTML5 tags, right?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| Then someone else will come along and not understand it,
| and wonder why we don't have content, styling, _and_
| logic all in one place. He will write some script on a
| napkin in a coffee shop, but spill some java on it. An
| implementation will be made, but the spilling won 't
| stop, not even after it reaches RAM.
| benibela wrote:
| But also allow abbreviations like <i>foo</> or <em>foo</>
| or <em/foo/
| [deleted]
| rubatuga wrote:
| Very true, considering that symbols are easier for those who
| don't know English.
| type0 wrote:
| This is either a very dumb or a very smart idea.
| jnsie wrote:
| I'm sorry, I may be in the minority here but I strongly dislike
| this. Where I type no additional characters to start a paragraph
| in markdown, I'll need to type 9 characters with dumb down? Same
| goes for titles, subtitles, etc.? While I appreciate people
| trying to fix problems, I don't find the core symbols required
| for markdown _that_ esoteric and for anything else I 'm certain
| I'll have as much difficulty remembering the correct dumbdown as
| I would remembering the equivalent markdown.
| utopcell wrote:
| You are not in the minority. This repo is borderline trolling.
| gu5 wrote:
| Markdown is better for many people that want quick formatting
| even if you have to remember the syntax. Dumbdown is for
| people that want easy formatting, even if it takes more
| keystrokes.
| SemiNormal wrote:
| They can just use a word processor then. I am not really
| seeing the target audience for this.
| markstos wrote:
| Easy? Markdown was based on people already using " _" for
| bulleted lists, /slashes/ for italics and _bold* in
| plaintext email.
|
| People were writing valid Markdown before it was invented.
| It doesn't easier than that.
|
| No one ever has intuitively written Dumbdown.
| lucideer wrote:
| Given the title, I suspect this was the intent.
|
| Personally I really dislike Markdown, and this project does
| what I thought was impossible: it not only removes any & all
| advantages Markdown has over markup (brevity, human-
| readability), but it also somehow manages to make the bad
| things about Markdown (complex parsing, bad spec.) even worse
| again. Which is a truly impressive feat tbh.
|
| Full marks for ingenuity.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The whole point of Markdown is that the formatting is simple
| and keeps the text readable - even enhances readability over
| plain text with no formatting.
|
| Dumbdown is more keystrokes and the formatting gets in the way
| of readability.
|
| I try to be positive in all Show HN posts - but I'm having
| trouble finding something good to say about this.
| hinkley wrote:
| At least it doesn't assume inline HTML.
|
| Inline HTML is great for internal usage and pure peer
| relationships.
|
| It's a nonstarter when you're in a situation where you have
| contributions who are only partially invested or only
| pretending to be. In a work environment, the threat of
| ostracism has many more teeth and they are far sharper.
| Upload spyware or exploits, lose your job.
|
| The Elixir Markdown implementation doesn't even have an
| option to turn it off :/
| nattaylor wrote:
| "Keywords instead of key characters" is a feature to the
| author.
| clan wrote:
| Ahem. English keywords is a feature...
|
| While I like the abstraction of using English when
| programming I would like to keep it out of my text.
|
| Yes. You _could_ translate. But...
| hinkley wrote:
| I wonder how long we go down this road before we wrap back
| around to using ASCII/Unicode punctuation to mark up text
| (eg, paragraph and section symbols)
|
| If memory serves, early 90's era document editors might not
| have used them in their file formats, but did have a
| display mode that used them (so you could figure out why
| that word keeps being bold after you've told it five times
| to cut it out)
| s17n wrote:
| I think most people will prefer markdown, since this breaks the
| ability to read the doc as plain text. However for people that
| don't care about that, dumbdown might be nice.
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| "Do you want a markup language that doesn't require memorizing
| esoteric symbols but uses words instead?"
|
| In a word, no. Esoteric seems a stretch as a characterization
| of Markdown.
| pqb wrote:
| There are many opinions here that are rather do not follow your
| idea as-is, but I would like to say do not give up if your
| project is even dedicated for only your use-case. I believe, you
| already know the way how you write data is exactly what
| s-expressions in Lisp/Scheme languages are. I have been working
| in an editor, which has similar syntax but is really dedicated to
| create easy A4/letter paper print-outs instead of just typical
| documents. It is really works nice and if you will come with
| tooling (editor, components, mixins), very low/gradual learning
| and good execution you might cut out some market share if you
| will target specific niche if you already know.
|
| About the syntax and tooling - if you target typical user who
| already knows Word or Markdown, you should also try out to
| resemble the "actions" they typically would do. I mean, if I
| would need to create a list item, I think I will support the
| hyphens or star notation. They are kind of an idiom of a list
| item already. The same fact is that you can think out of
| competing with LaTeX in terms of typesetting, pdf rendering, ease
| of embedding graphs or being a Jupyter notebook/orgmode
| competitor in terms of running inlined code (i.e. code block),
| out-of-the-box layout formatting (report, 2-columns, article)
| etc. etc.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| To give a counter-perspective to many of the current comments:
| this is awesome.
|
| Maybe HN isn't the right demographic, but for someone that works
| with people that aren't super tech savvy, this seems like it will
| have a good place with them.
|
| I clicked through to treenotation.org too and I really like the
| direction the treenotation ecosystem is heading in. Looking
| forward to more of what's to come. Kudos.
| specialist wrote:
| I'm with you.
|
| This is a "Yes, And..." tool. Dumbdown compliments existing
| solutions.
|
| TDLR: Dictation, transcription of voice input.
|
| First use case I thought of is voice transcription. Dictating
| HTML, markup, misc _sucks_. Dumbdown could make it practical.
|
| Better dictation has been on my mind a lot recently. Once I got
| a dog, I got _A LOT_ more interested in audio & voice.
| Podcasts, audiobooks, voice commands.
|
| Now diving into using Siri Shortcuts for transcribing my
| Quantified Self stuff. eg I speak my weight and blood pressure,
| which creates entries in Health.app. Neat, right?
|
| Well, dictation of text messages truly sucks. No editing mode.
| There's no vi style out of band meta language to munge stuff
| afterwards. At least none that I've found.
|
| And Siri's auto carrot truly pisses me off. Not the mistakes,
| that's tolerable. What I can't handle is editing and correcting
| pops me out of whatever task I'm doing.
|
| For my Night Shift style ramblings, I now just use the voice
| recorder. Basically sending voice mails / memos to my future
| self. I feel stupid doing it. Always reminds me of a boss
| (Peter) who'd do this. Very clever strategy. But omg his
| messages made us worker bees howl. He'd call his home phone and
| say something "Hi, this is Peter, remember to buy milk. Bye
| bye." Like he wouldn't know it was himself calling. Gods, I
| still crack up thinking about it.
|
| Any way...
| filleduchaos wrote:
| > but for someone that works with people that aren't super tech
| savvy, this seems like it will have a good place with them.
|
| People who are bad enough at tech that it's genuinely easier
| for them to type "paragraph" rather than hit enter twice every
| time they want a new paragraph were never the target audience
| for Markdown in the first place. They simply...use regular old
| rich text editors.
| tylerchilds wrote:
| Rich text editors to dumbdown to markdown seems like a pretty
| good educational pathway to me.
|
| Might take a tech savvy person 5 seconds and a less tech
| savvy person 5 weeks, but for some, they might never get it
| without something like dumbdown to help pave their neural
| network.
| filleduchaos wrote:
| It doesn't seem that great of a pathway to me. It's
| designed to solve a perceived problem _with Markdown_ ,
| without considering the problem that Markdown itself was
| created to solve (an easier way than HTML to write rich
| text in a plain text editor). What's the set of people who
| both have that problem _and_ have symbols vs keywords as
| their only barrier to fixing it?
|
| Plus to me brackets, asterisks and other symbols are not an
| obscure tech thing. It's literally how tons of sites and
| apps do their rich text formatting - Reddit and many other
| forums for one, messaging apps like Whatsapp and Discord
| for another. From observation on e.g. Reddit, picking it up
| is a fairly straightforward process:
|
| - someone does fancy formatting trick - "whoa how did you
| get your comment to come out like that?" - "it's easy, you
| put blah blah [in front of/around] your text and it does
| blah" - [tries it out] "neat! thanks"
|
| I don't really see how having people type out "paragraph",
| "title", "list", etc helps with that process.
| tomphoolery wrote:
| This is basically a longer version of Haml.
| zackkrida wrote:
| how do I have a link in a paragraph?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| What if my paragraph talks about chains? Will random words
| become hyperlinks?
| breck wrote:
| I don't think the Dumbdown prototype does that yet (haven't
| looked at the full thing in a while).
|
| But inline links, bolds, italics, et cetera are super duper
| simple.
|
| Tree Languages concatenate. markdown
| Someone can define a markdown node type and then you
| can just use markdown like you normally would *embed*
| _markdown_. emojiDown And this whole sentence
| would be bold if you added your own mini language,
| "emojiDown", which defined your own node types
| dang wrote:
| Related from 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856525
| breck wrote:
| Thanks dang! And to explain what's changed since then: Before
| it was just an idea, but wasn't actually planning on making it.
|
| Now it's got it's own repo and fully intend on turning this
| into a real thing once we've come up with a good spec.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Coming soon: Nodown, the Markdown alternative that literally just
| doesn't do anything.
|
| Okay joke's out the way now, back to serious.
|
| I don't get why having to memorize "title" instead of "#" is any
| different. What if the word were "header" instead, its just
| another arbitrary keyword at the end of the day.
|
| After writing that out, it seems using words instead of symbols
| is actually more difficult, because of ambiguity (title vs
| header, which was it again?)
|
| Regardless, kudos to author for putting together and releasing
| something they believe in. I hope they are able to take the
| criticism constructively and learn from it too :)
| julienreszka wrote:
| Nice if you want to edit with voice
| reikonomusha wrote:
| This is very out-of-the-box thinking and a neat perspective. It
| also makes it easy for screen readers without special software.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| I only struggle to remember the order or brackets for links in
| markdown.
| jmholla wrote:
| I usually find remembering that footnotes use square brackets
| for both reminds me the text is always bracketed (since the
| link style would have to change to differentiate).
| [link][footnote] [footnote]: https://example.com
|
| You can also use footnotes without other text, and the text
| that you would probably expect rendered is the footnote text.
| Click the [link] to learn more. [link]:
| https://example.com
| kstrauser wrote:
| Remember it like [this is the text](which you can find over
| here).
| winrid wrote:
| This looks like the COBOL of Markdown.
| AnonHP wrote:
| Sorry to be a bit harsh, but the first example looks like what a
| screen reader would read out aloud on a poorly designed site. The
| repetitive "markup" words seem noisy and are quite distracting.
| Maybe you could consider more symbolic choices (which would
| probably make this also closer to Markdown).
| vharuck wrote:
| Honest question: is there a reason to use this over LaTeX? If I
| stick to the core formatting also offered by Markdown, LaTeX is
| not hard to remember. And if I want to go beyond the basics,
| there's plenty of documentation.
| type0 wrote:
| Ah, I see some similarities if I squint until my eyes start to
| bleed.
| Jenz wrote:
| As if Markdown wasn't dumb enough already?
| screye wrote:
| of all the things to dumb down, I'd say markdown is pretty much
| last in line.
|
| It is about as easy as it gets.
| pietrovismara wrote:
| Thanks for letting me learn (through the README) that Markdown
| was created by Aaron Swartz (and John Gruber). I love that his
| legacy can go on also through it.
| maaaaattttt wrote:
| While this is nice on principles, its raw version is hard to
| read. I have to actively separate formatting keywords from
| content keywords. On the other hand, a nice byproduct of markdown
| is that the raw version almost gets formatted already from the
| syntax itself.
| [deleted]
| diarrhea wrote:
| I'm not sure I want to live in a world where Markdown requires
| more dumbing down.
| k__ wrote:
| I had the impression Markdown already is the dumb alternative to
| AsciiDoc.
| ericol wrote:
| The very first issue "Make GitHub support readme.dumbdown" gave
| me a good chuckle.
|
| One man can dream, right?
|
| [0] https://github.com/treenotation/dumbdown/issues/1
| ktm5j wrote:
| I appreciate the goal of this project, but I expect that I will
| still forget at least some of the words and will still have to
| look at the docs. I actually think it would be harder for me to
| remember the words than symbols but that's just me!
| baby wrote:
| I'm failing to see why anyone would use this. Is it April's fool
| already?
| randomsearch wrote:
| This is a quirky idea and it's interesting.
|
| Bit of an aside: why are the links in markdown poorly designed?
| The rest of the language is really intuitive so it surprises me
| that links are not. Using two types of bracket is an obviously
| bad idea.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I have to admit that I like this, it is a neat idea. Maybe there
| should be shorthand syntax, so that paragraph can be p. Otherwise
| it is decent. Inline obviously wouldn't work with this, and it
| works with markdown. In fact, when you look at it, it really
| isn't related to markdown much.
|
| But good to think about how to process text better.
| dustinmoris wrote:
| The beautiful thing about markdown is that it looks correct in
| plain text as well as when parsed. I often look at Markdown
| READMEs from a text editor or a console and things like lists,
| headings, links, etc. just make sense the way they have been
| formatted, making easy smooth reading possible.
|
| Dumbdown doesn't. That's reason enough why this is not for me.
| Also I find the markup not hard to remember at all. It's fairly
| straightfoward and second nature to me by now.
| cesarvarela wrote:
| I'll wait for the dumbed down version of dumbdown.
| jack_riminton wrote:
| I think thats just word processors
| Terretta wrote:
| This is so well named.
|
| And the subheading is crystal clear in its perfect accuracy.
|
| Unclear why we need any comments when that's so well synthesized
| already.
| ziml77 wrote:
| Markdown isn't perfect but I'm sorry to say this isn't the
| answer. You're still forced to memorize syntax, it's just that
| it's full words instead of symbols (which becomes extra difficult
| for non-English speakers). This also breaks one of the best
| aspects of Markdown which is that it appears just as well
| formatted in a text editor as it does when fully rendered.
|
| As far as I know, Markdown isn't well specified so maybe that's a
| place to contribute instead.
|
| But if Dumbdown works for you, that's great. I don't want to
| discourage you from working on it if you're enjoying it. Just
| know that based on its current goals, it's going to be quite
| niche.
| dmje wrote:
| Square peg, round hole. Repeat after me. [Square peg](Round
| hole).
|
| That's all you need.
| taf2 wrote:
| We need a typodown next so evertine you typo paragraph or tittle
| it automatically figures it out
| type0 wrote:
| I will adopt it for documentation in my next project if I decide
| to use brainfuck as the main language. Thank you, it looks
| amazing. /s
| abeppu wrote:
| Most of this thread is giving entirely good reasons why this is
| worse than markdown; longer to type, kinda worse to read,
| misunderstands how markdown aligns with _patterns people were
| already using_.
|
| I agree with those, and I wouldn't reach for dumbdown either.
|
| But maybe more interesting is the tree notation thing that this
| is meant to be a use case of. So far as I can tell, the tree-
| notation thing is a declarative DSL for grammars and textual
| "compilers", like maybe a very simplified ANTLR? Dumbdown is a
| ~100 line example, so even if it's not useful as a "real" format,
| it does seem illustrative of the tooling. And that tooling makes
| me think ... maybe we would have been better off if markdown (and
| extensions like GH-flavored markdown) had been implemented and
| shared as declarations in a language-description DSL.
| TuringTest wrote:
| You beat me to it. Any time treenotation.org is involved, the
| most fascinating part is how you can build compilers for
| interesting use cases in a very simple declarative way.
|
| Usually, creating a new DSL is a complex programming task; yet
| with Tree Notation, a domain expert may tweak an existing DSL
| or even build a simple one from scratch. As you say, maybe the
| markdown ecosystem would benefit from this approach.
| lambda_obrien wrote:
| In today's world of a thousand package managers, why isn't
| there a package manager for datatype schemas? Then, when I'm
| looking for an "addressbook" schema, I can just download the
| most popular one. It could include tooling/plugins to convert
| schemas to different data or programming languages, so create
| a Haskell datatype for "addressbook" or create the JSON
| representation of "addressbook".
| TuringTest wrote:
| I think the Semantic Web was supposed to be that. Yet it
| was waaay too abstract for the majority of people, even
| programmers.
| timClicks wrote:
| So much so that a Language Designer is part of the standard
| toolchain https://jtree.treenotation.org/designer/
| timdaub wrote:
| Lol is this a dadaist software project?
|
| > breck7 is currently the BDFL: Benevolent Dummy For Life. But if
| you feel like you can be a better Dummy, please either fork this
| project and prove it, or just get involved and stage a peaceful
| coup. Breck would happily relinguish the BDFL title if a better
| Dummy comes along.
|
| BECAUSE IF SO I HAVE ONE TOO! =>>
| https://github.com/TimDaub/daemybenscrypt
| pmlnr wrote:
| A dumb alternative to Markdown is plain text.
| arbie wrote:
| As someone that could never get into Markdown, this looks
| promising to me!
| julianlam wrote:
| Markdown is not esoteric. If anything, it's as natural as you can
| get. *Asterisks* to bold and _underscores_ to emphasize come
| naturally.
|
| The one thing you have to learn is the bracket notation for
| anchors, and that's because it's needed to render the html
| anchor. Nothing stops you from pasting a plain link (and a lot of
| markdown parsers turn it into an anchor for you even)
| mottosso wrote:
| Except *asterisks* doesn't **bold**, it _emphasizes_. :) Edit:
| Aha! I think I see what happened here, HN formatting. :)
| webmaven wrote:
| _> Edit: Aha! I think I see what happened here, HN
| formatting. :)_
|
| I may be in the minority here, but I wish HN supported just a
| bit more formatting (such as bolding/strong) than it
| currently does.
|
| I also wish the current formatting was a bit more aggressive
| in recovering from obvious errors, for example emphasis
| should probably be closed at the end of a block like a
| paragraph, rather than making the whole rest of a comment
| emphasized when someone forgets to add or accidentally
| deletes a closing asterisk.
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(page generated 2021-01-20 23:01 UTC)