[HN Gopher] Djot: A light markup language by the creator of Pand...
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Djot: A light markup language by the creator of Pandoc and
CommonMark
Author : eevilspock
Score : 98 points
Date : 2022-12-05 16:24 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tosh wrote:
| Related: "Beyond Markdown" https://johnmacfarlane.net/beyond-
| markdown.html
| dschuessler wrote:
| I recently found out that the author is John MacFarlane, a
| philosophy professor I have read papers from in totally unrelated
| contexts. I was more than surprised to see that he is the
| original author of pandoc. It boggles my mind how someone with an
| academic career in a somewhat unrelated field can have a GitHub
| profile like him. It's really impressive.
|
| On topic, though, preceding sublists with empty lines is a
| complete non-starter for me. However, since I don't hard-wrap
| lines (goal 7), but use soft-wrap only, I am not in the target
| audience anyways.
| abathur wrote:
| Good sign of a persistent yak-shaver :)
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah that stuck out to me as the most objectionable thing at
| first glance too. Otherwise it looks reasonably sane. I
| currently use AsciiDoc and it's ok but this looks slightly
| better I would say.
|
| Both are clearly better than RST.
| mikl wrote:
| Given the ubiquity of Markdown, and how painful it is to build a
| completely compliant parser, I really hope Djot (or something
| like it) would take off.
|
| Shame that the creator of Markdown blocks any efforts to to fix
| or standardise the format.
| jdelman wrote:
| CommonMark is the "standardized" version, isn't it?
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| The creator of the original Markdown requested that the
| standardized version be renamed to avoid using the word
| "Markdown".
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-
| commo...
| mikl wrote:
| ...and threatened legal action against anyone using the
| word "Markdown" in a way he did not approve of.
|
| Jeff Atwood goes out of his way to be courteous to Gruber
| in this post, but frankly, I think Gruber was being a jerk
| here, using his claim to the name to tyrannise an open
| source community that he has otherwise not been involved
| with in the slightest the last ~17 years.
| civopsec wrote:
| > In djot, we just get rid of indented code blocks. Most people
| prefer fenced code blocks anyway, and we don't need two different
| ways of writing code blocks (goal 11).
|
| Sensible. Mostly since it makes other things easier (goal 5),
| second because one thing is only represented in one way, and
| thirdly (least important) since indented code blocks are kind of
| a pain to format compared to fenced code blocks.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I never realized the problem with markup until that phrase "light
| markup". The problem is that it's designed for a human to edit it
| by hand with a text editor. It's a programmer designing for a
| programmer, rather than for a user. It's a plumber designing a
| sink. A mechanic designing a radio. A busboy designing tableware.
|
| What we should have instead of markup, is a WYSIWYG with keyboard
| shortcuts. Confluence, for example, will convert Markdown into
| rich text in real time, and has keyboard shortcuts for its other
| layout/style options. But the point is to edit it in a GUI, see
| your changes live, and not need to learn a language in order to
| edit a document. There are so many problems you avoid by giving
| the user tools to make their life easier. Markup may be one tiny
| part of that, but it shouldn't be considered the complete
| solution.
| civopsec wrote:
| Interestingly though in this case it's an amateur programmer
| (since being a professor of philosophy is his day job).
| nequo wrote:
| > say, by clicking on the display itself, clicking "Menu ->
| Layout -> Options" selecting the layout we want, and seeing it
| displayed immediately
|
| Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are saying. Isn't this the
| same as LibreOffice Writer and Microsoft Word? What is the
| existing problem that such an interface would solve?
| adlpz wrote:
| I understand the rationale and how CommonMark parsing is not
| trivial and could be simplified, but the resulting language
| misses, for me, the best part of Markdown: that it happens to be
| _pretty much_ just what I 'd write in plain text anyways.
|
| The odd newline requirements on lists and blocks, the special
| syntax for raw HTML and so on makes Djot feel more artificial to
| me.
| layer8 wrote:
| What odd newline requirements? I skimmed the syntax reference
| and couldn't find any.
| trynewideas wrote:
| Also preferring rST-style list syntax, requiring an empty
| line between parent and child lists.
|
| So: - list - sublist -
| sublist
|
| is valid Markdown but invalid djot, while -
| list - sublist - sublist
|
| is valid djot.
| gernb wrote:
| In markdown My favorite number is probably
| the number 1. It's the smallest natural number that
| is > 0. With pencils, though, I prefer a # 2.
|
| is a paragraph, a list item, a block quote, and a heading (4
| things). In djot it's just a single paragraph.
|
| If you want it to be 4 things you have to add a newline
| between each one.
|
| Personally I think djot gets this right.
| layer8 wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I agree that it makes sense to require an empty
| line before block elements that typically also require an
| empty line after.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Exactly, the sublist newline stuff is a total nonstarter for
| me. Sorry, I guess I'll run a markdown parser that takes an
| extra second or whatever to run.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| The fact that we cannot standardize on extensions means that
| markdown feels inadequate for more technical documents. If just
| a free more restrictions means I can easily add block
| annotations to everything, I will jump aboard immediately. That
| it is easier for parser writers is just a perk.
| chungy wrote:
| I honestly don't get why Markdown became preferred in most
| projects over AsciiDoc.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think this is partly because AsciiDoc has broadly been
| tied to a single implementation, AsciiDoctor, without a
| spec, not even a sketch in a blog post like the original
| Markdown was. It's only recently that AsciiDoc has begun to
| think of itself as "a markup language" rather than "the
| markup language used by AsciiDoctor". A spec is apparently
| WIP.
|
| As for why it never gained the memetic popularity of
| Markdown that might have led to a different trajectory,
| that's harder to say. The One True Markdown is
| fundamentally much simpler than AsciiDoc, and consequently
| much easier to learn, easier implement in JavaScript for
| live rendering on the Web, and easier to extend with your
| own opinionated features. So I think it was easy and
| attractive for various platforms like Hacker News and
| Github to support it, and this I think had a snowballing
| network effect.
|
| Personally I love AsciiDoc and I think it's the future of
| technical writing and publishing. It's everything I wanted
| out of reStructuredText but without its fussy, non-
| composable syntax. However I don't think that future will
| become reality until a spec is published that is friendly
| to implementers other than AsciiDoctor.
| chungy wrote:
| AsciiDoctor is a second implementation that doesn't even
| fully compatibly implement the original specification.
| The original AsciiDoc is pretty well-specified, and it's
| mostly the plaintext markup of stuff that was intended to
| go to DocBook, with very little surprises from that.
|
| AsciiDoctor pretty much focused on a direct HTML
| translation and ignored the inconvenient parts. (Some of
| the inconvenient parts are deprecated syntax that while
| AsciiDoc's had a replacement for, I've written the old
| style for ~20 years and when GitHub tries to render a
| document with AsciiDoctor, oops; sometimes I'll change
| the document, sometimes I'll decide rendering on GitHub
| isn't important.)
| markstos wrote:
| Because people know and like Markdown. It's good enough so
| they don't go looking for a replacement.
|
| Markdown is used enough that you are going to need to know
| the syntax. So a competitor doesn't just have to better, it
| has to have enough additional merits to be worth learning
| in addition to Markdown.
| nerdponx wrote:
| AsciiDoctor and Org Mode both have substantial additional
| merits over Markdown, and have dedicated user bases. The
| problem nowadays is that of implementation availability.
| wnoise wrote:
| Have you tried to parse it? Even the Swiss army knife of
| document formats, pandoc, only supports it as an output
| format.
| abathur wrote:
| I suspect a lot of it's inertia from before the choice
| mattered or was actually reflected on (though I guess there
| are still plenty of projects changing).
|
| It's easy, most projects can satisfice with it, and people
| on the projects that can't satisfice with it may not think
| about markup enough to realize they're painting themselves
| into a corner until they have a big ballast of existing
| documentation to cope with?
|
| I've been fumbling around for how to convey signs that a
| project may need better tools
| (https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/)
| but it's been slow-going and I'm bearish on how well
| ~better-practices will spread.
| IshKebab wrote:
| If you just want the expressiveness of Markdown then that's
| fine, but this is targeted at the same space as AsciiDoc -
| writing big documents and even books. It's going to be painful
| doing that without the ability to add footnotes, cross
| references, figures, notes, etc. etc.
|
| I mean you can do it - look at all the RFCs for example - but
| they must have been unpleasant to write and they're certainly
| unpleasant to read.
| solarkraft wrote:
| HTML is quite good at what it was invented for. Why is it so out
| of fashion?
| leephillips wrote:
| 17^th^ is more pleasant to read and write than 17<sup>th</sup>,
| for example.
|
| For me, I use Markdown because I can transform it with Pandoc
| and my own filters to any other kind of document:
|
| https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/
| abathur wrote:
| Verbosity is the _obvious_ answer, but this past year I
| stumbled into a conclusion that wasn 't obvious to me before:
| "semantic" HTML isn't serving authors' needs--it's serving the
| UA's needs.
|
| I picked at what I mean a little in a post this summer:
| https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/the_gizmos_role_in_markup/
|
| (I've also made the first post in an unfinished series that
| will continue to explore these ideas about markup, but a bit
| less directly:
| https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/)
| Cyberdog wrote:
| Aside from the sibling answers, Markdown, though originally
| intended solely for HTML output, is useful for writing other
| types of documents; I've written an e-book which was eventually
| destined for PDF format as a series of Markdown files. I could
| have used HTML instead, but aside from being more difficult to
| write, Markdown's document orientation solves some problems
| with that (should the HTML-to-PDF translator handle CSS and
| evaluate JavaScript? How does it deal with <audio> or <video>
| tags?) by not making them a possibility in the first place.
|
| Similarly, for things like comments on message boards or blogs,
| a user can just dump a bunch of text into the text box without
| knowing the first thing about Markdown and expect it to look
| more or less like how it was entered, with paragraph breaks and
| such. If you force these people to use HTML instead, you're
| forcing them to at least learn and use <p></p> - which is
| probably simple for those of us reading HN, but I don't
| consider it a reasonable request for the normies on Reddit.
|
| So, sure, HTML is quite good at what it was invented for, but
| not everything that involves text input on the internet or
| elsewhere should be HTML.
| Cyberdog wrote:
| As someone who's been using Markdown since before it was cool, I
| love it! I think writing the implementation in Lua is an
| interesting take since Lua out-of-the-box does not support
| standard regular expressions; it instead has its own pattern-
| matching thing which is a bit more limited. But it looks like
| they've embraced that limitation to force themselves to write
| something that doesn't need a full regex library to be sanely
| parsed.
|
| My biggest complaint is that asterisks map to <strong> and
| underscores map to <em> (in HTML terms). This is not backwards-
| compatible with Markdown where (asterisk)foo(asterisk) gets you
| <em>foo</em>, and it feels objectively backwards, if that makes
| sense. I wonder if there's any chance they could reverse that.
| gernb wrote:
| The odds of replacing markdown and all it's issues seem nearly
| impossible given its ubiquity and I've run into many of those
| problems but, this seems just as arbitrary in many ways,
|
| For example:
|
| > Block-level elements can't interrupt paragraphs (or headings),
| because of goal 7
|
| It then goes on to show they do interrupt paragraphs
| - this then - this other thing
|
| vs - this then - this other thing
|
| The 2nd is 2 list items but it's just the first with being
| interrupted by a block-level element.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| The second example is indented; line-wrapping doesn't introduce
| indentation, so an indented line cannot be 'interrupting a
| paragraph'
| joemaller1 wrote:
| How do you say it?
| jez wrote:
| The homepage lists the IPA
|
| https://djot.net/
|
| /dZat/
|
| /dZ/ is like both the `j` and `dg` in english judge
|
| /a/ is like the a in father in most American english dialects
|
| /dZat/ is also the complete IPA for the word "jot" (as in "to
| jot down") in American English
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jot
| dcre wrote:
| Jot.
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