[HN Gopher] Footnotes now supported in GitHub Markdown
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Footnotes now supported in GitHub Markdown
Author : gampleman
Score : 151 points
Date : 2021-09-30 14:27 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Is https://github.github.com/gfm/ maintained? If so I would have
| expected to see this addition in there. On that subject, it's
| been a while since I needed a new markdown parser but I kinda
| like this feature, where do I find the source for the parser?
|
| EDIT: OJFord answers my question below.
|
| P.S. Why am I forced to watch (and re-watch) an animated GIF when
| you could have simply shown the source and resulting rendered
| HTML in my browser?! Meanwhile, the example code they do provide
| is left completely without a rendered output. Must everything
| spoon feed video these days? Madness!
|
| P.S.S why is "simple" colored cyan?
| brundolf wrote:
| It's funny to watch Markdown gradually reinvent HTML as it
| originally was (though with much more readable syntax)
|
| And I don't actually think that's a bad thing, so long as it
| stops there. HTML has become much more than documents, so having
| a constrained subset dedicated to documents is helpful.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Markdown hasn't changed a bit from its reference
| implementation, it can't.
|
| Everybody who grabbed onto Markdown and is forking it because
| they're realizing that it was a very simple tool to solve one
| man's blogging problem and ignored all the other more
| comprehensive LWMLs is reinventing HTML.
| brundolf wrote:
| GitHub-flavored Markdown is different; it's almost taken over
| as the de-facto standard. There are lots of wacky extensions
| out there, but this isn't just another one of those.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'm personally very conservative about what I want added to
| markdown. I use it heavily _because_ it doesn 't provide me too
| many options.
|
| That said, links and references are a nice thing to have done
| well.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I use Joplin to take notes, it's Markdown-based and it also
| includes some interesting extras like Mermaid support for
| diagrams.
|
| http://joplinapp.org/
|
| https://mermaid-js.github.io/
| tomrod wrote:
| To be fair, it is simpler than HTML. Like Java vs. Python. You
| can sure do a lot with Java, but sometimes you just want the
| beauty of Python without injection, ya know?
| munch117 wrote:
| I don't understand how you can say that. Markdown is
| massively more complicated than the equivalent HTML. HTML
| syntax is simple: Every gizmo is expressed as a <tag> and
| optionally an end </tag>, there are escapes for <, > and &,
| and that's all that ever needs escaping.
|
| Markdown, on the other hand, has a syntax that is ever
| expanding. It's all exceptions to exceptions to exceptions
| (exceptions all the way down).
|
| For example, what happens if in a markdown document talking
| about regular expressions you have this text: [^A-Za-z]. Will
| it be interpreted as a footnote? Or is it an exception? Who
| knows, only trial and error will tell.
| kyleee wrote:
| And it may be handled differently between the many
| "flavors" of markdown!
|
| In my experience, with decent editor assistance to help
| with boilerplate, closing html tags, etx. I enjoy writing
| simple docs more in html
| brundolf wrote:
| You're talking about parsing/syntax, but what matters here
| is semantics. (Normal) Markdown maps to a small subset of
| all possible HTML tags, most of them on the simpler end of
| things, and that makes its overall scope and semantics
| simpler than those of HTML, even if its syntax is not.
| munch117 wrote:
| Means and ends. If your means are complex, but the ends
| you are achieving are simple, then you're not getting
| good value for money. If I am to abide complex syntax
| then I'd better get sophisticated, powerful semantics in
| return.
|
| HTML 1.0 (no CSS, no JS, no floats) is very similar in
| scope to Markdown. I wish every site that uses Markdown
| would allow me to write something like HTML 1.0 instead.
| It would be so much easier, at least for me.
| stilisstuk wrote:
| Just use restructured text (rST) already.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| No, asciidoctor! Asciidoctor is the most intuitive markup
| format there is (except maybe Pollen, but that's a non
| starter for most people).
|
| Also, rST can't even do bold italics.
| jsilence wrote:
| Nothing beats org-mode.
| [deleted]
| CyberShadow wrote:
| HTML doesn't have footnotes, does it?
| Diti wrote:
| HTML 5 has the aside tag, which has the semantics of
| footnotes.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Aside" is very rarely used as a footnote, and doesn't
| inherently have footnote semantics.
|
| Not even in W3C's rather underrepresented suggested usage
| (as distinguished from common practice):
|
| _The objective of this technique is to use the HTML5 aside
| element to indicate that it 's content is tangentially
| related to the main article or a parent section. The aside
| element represents a section of a page that consists of
| content that could be considered separate from that
| content. Such sections are often represented as sidebars in
| printed typography._
|
| https://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Using_the_aside_element_to_i
| n...
|
| https://awkawk.github.io/using_aside_content.html
|
| _Dive Into HTML5_ anaogises <aside> to sidebars:
|
| _The aside element represents a section of a page that
| consists of content that is tangentially related to the
| content around the aside element, and which could be
| considered separate from that content. Such sections are
| often represented as sidebars in printed typography. The
| element can be used for typographical effects like pull
| quotes or sidebars, for advertising, for groups of nav
| elements, and for other content that is considered separate
| from the main content of the page._
|
| http://diveintohtml5.info/semantics.html
| brundolf wrote:
| It basically does. You can use anchors to approximate the
| behavior described here (it will be more verbose, but that's
| to be expected)
| windthrown wrote:
| I think people are referring to the practice of effectively
| creating footnotes with HTML anchor tags [1]
|
| [1] http://karlwinegardner.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-to-
| create-fo...
| eslaught wrote:
| Is this implemented in cmark-gfm?
|
| https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm
| OJFord wrote:
| Yes, simply look at the latest release which contains three
| bugfixes related to footnotes:
|
| https://github.com/github/cmark-gfm/releases/tag/0.29.0.gfm....
| superkuh wrote:
| You know what's not supoprted in GitHub Markdown? Anchors. There
| are no functional anchors on any GitHub page. They have something
| in their markdown that looks very much like anchors but instead
| of being an actual HTML anchor it requires loading and executing
| javascript first.
|
| If github wants to actually support real markdown then footnotes
| are good, but maybe work on supporting anchors first. They're
| very important for readmes.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Instead of reinventing the wheel and shoehorning basic
| functionality into markdown, why not just use a markup format
| that already "just works", like asciidoctor?
| eitland wrote:
| I think GitHub support Asciidoc already, you just have to
| specify it.
|
| Or is that GitLab?
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| GitHub supports it, so I don't see why they don't just
| encourage users to use it instead of reinventing the wheel
| with markdown
| stock_toaster wrote:
| I thought it only rendered files in the repo (match by
| extension). Does GH also allow asciidoc(tor) syntax in
| comments and issues?
|
| * Note: Sadly, include is not supported on GH.
| https://github.com/github/markup/issues/1095
| c-smile wrote:
| Not sure how useful are footnotes but the lack of ability to
| assign stable ID to headers is annoying.
|
| Something like: ###|about What is all this
| about?
|
| And #2 in wish list is built-in support for `<details>` -
| collapsible sections - quite useful in documentation.
| CyberShadow wrote:
| You can already do this with HTML, if you want to:
|
| ### <a id="about"></a>What is all this about?
| c-smile wrote:
| In your case id is assigned to wrong element.
|
| So to use <h3 id=about>What is all this
| about?</h3>
|
| But what's the point of using MD then?
| mstade wrote:
| The details html tag works fine on GitHub; or did you mean
| you'd like a new syntax that's more markdownesque?
|
| EDIT: Definite +1 for the stable headers id suggestion. I
| implemented something similar in a proof of concept app a while
| back, but it was a suffix rather than a prefix, in brackets,
| like so: # About this project { #about }
|
| It worked really well, and the syntax allowed for additional
| properties like css like class syntax. Thouh we referred to
| them as tags because they were used to tag sections, paragraphs
| etc., so we could do some interesting aggregation later on.
| c-smile wrote:
| I would rather define some MD rule for <DL><DT><DD> and ask
| viewers to use collapsing ### Properties
| + #### innerHTML Get/set inner HTML content
| + #### innerText Get/set content as text
| ### Methods
| erdo wrote:
| Not sure if this helps you, and you may already be aware of it,
| but in my gitHub pages markdown I have titles like these:
|
| ## <a name="boiler-plate"></a>Removing more boiler plate
| erdo wrote:
| I just read that using "id" is the preferred way (see the
| other reply) "name" is deprecated for this use, but it still
| works of course (I'm not a web developer, been using the same
| markdown trick for years)
| theden wrote:
| Is this a GitHub-specific feature or is it something defined in
| the MarkDown spec?
| zlsa wrote:
| It's not part of the original spec for Markdown, but it looks
| like it's a relatively standard addition to Markdown:
|
| https://www.markdownguide.org/extended-syntax/#footnotes
| sandyarmstrong wrote:
| But do note it's not part of CommonMark yet:
| https://spec.commonmark.org/current/
|
| I hope it gets there. I like this feature. :-)
| dalrympm wrote:
| Does anyone know of a good reference table showing what IS
| supported on GH vs. something like Goldmark (Hugo's default)?
|
| I find that I constrain myself to the bare minimum in .md because
| I'm not sure what is supported.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A Markdown Rosetta Stone would be a useful tool.
| [deleted]
| wetpaws wrote:
| Any new feature in markdown is a bad feature by definition.
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(page generated 2021-09-30 23:01 UTC)