2024-02-23

Well it's been awhile since my last "get off my lawn" old man rant
but here I go again...

I don't like Markdown. I never did.

There I said it. The sad part is that I was there when the original
Markdown announcement came out. Afterall, Gruber's blog was quite
influential in the heady days of the blogosphere.

Was HTML really that difficult of a format for general writing that
Gruber deemed it necessary for a brand new markup language? In my
opinion, yes and no.

Cast yourself back in time to the early 2000s. XHTML1.0, HTML4.01
and CSS2 ruled the document mark-up land. Gruber was trying to
write a markup language that was simpler and prettier to use than
raw XHTML1.0/HTML4.01 and CSS.

So in that respect I get it. But for me personally? I just continued
to write and use HTML version 3.2. You could say that I was an
early retro-computing enthusiast I guess.

But HTML3.2 was really designed in an era where humans were writing
raw HTML and it worked great for banging out any type of plain-text
formatted document that could be read universally by anyone. For
any static and manually created document, HTML3.2 worked just fine.

The specification itself is easily memorized and is extremely
expressive for any type of document that you need. Don't believe
me? Read the spec yourself and marvel at all the cool formatting
things you could do.

https://www.w3.org/TR/2018/SPSD-html32-20180315/

In any case, obviously markdown filled an urgent need for the web
as content management systems and blogging software started to
overtake manually created static websites.  But isn't it a shame
that we moved from an actual standard to a quasi-standard with a
bunch of different flavors?

Ah well what the hell do I know anyways? I'm just a guy who knows
how to write HTML3.2 from memory but can't remember half of the
markdown syntax. In other words, get off my lawn!

PS. Most of my SDF webspace is created manually with HTML3.2