The problem is that in most cases where I have to use markdown, it's not a source file. E.g. if in a git comment I use a single newline to separate some points, it's often a surprise to then find them concatenated on a single line.
Like this very hacker news comment box here. I know it's not really markdown, but it also ignores single newlines. Why?
Markdown is not really presenting itself as being source code, or at least it's not being used as such in many places. If you want source code, why not use something more powerful than something that tries to look like plain text, except it alters your whitespace?
Also, in programming source code it's natural to try to keep it within 80 characters. But markdown is for writing natural language, isn't it a nightmare then to keep all lines 80 characters if you edit previous sentences or insert a word somewhere?
Markdown has a syntax for bullet lists, why not use that?
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from. It would be nice if there were a single light weight markup language.
In many contexts you need something where text can be reflowed. Hacker News is a good example. It would be bad if all comments with long lines would show up with scroll bars.
So if the output is going to be reformatted anyhow, then it is better to use a light weight markup language that provides a quick way to provide the most common rendering hints.
> It would be bad if all comments with long lines would show up with scroll bars.
No it woulnd't, more newlines (by not ignoring single newlines) would make lines shorter on average, not longer.
It should of course auto wrap long lines (and plain text does), horizontal scrollbars suck.
So markdown only makes you choose between ignoring your single newlines or preformatted text with horizontal scrollbars but cannot combine best of both worlds? That makes it even worse.
> The problem is that in most cases where I have to use markdown, it's not a source file. E.g. if in a git comment I use a single newline to separate some points, it's often a surprise to then find them concatenated on a single line.
Git commit messages (I assume that's what you mean by comment) are conventionally fill-paragraph'd with the traditional 72/80 limit, so I would expect this reformatting to occur. Markdown has proper bulleted list supports, use that. Or paragraphs. It also supports explicit linebreaks (two trailing spaces) but that's usually hard to read.
> Like this very hacker news comment box here. I know it's not really markdown, but it also ignores single newlines. Why?
Well in no small part because it blows chunks.
> But markdown is for writing natural language, isn't it a nightmare then to keep all lines 80 characters if you edit previous sentences or insert a word somewhere?
1. markdown (and most other lightweight markups) grew from email conventions and conventionally formatted text files (check out the text RFCs)
2. in emacs, re-filling a paragraph is an M-q away
> But markdown is for writing natural language, isn't it a nightmare then to keep all lines 80 characters if you edit previous sentences or insert a word somewhere?
No, press M-q, done. But it is nightmare, if the lines are long, or additionally cut in the middle of the word.
Like this very hacker news comment box here. I know it's not really markdown, but it also ignores single newlines. Why?
Markdown is not really presenting itself as being source code, or at least it's not being used as such in many places. If you want source code, why not use something more powerful than something that tries to look like plain text, except it alters your whitespace?
Also, in programming source code it's natural to try to keep it within 80 characters. But markdown is for writing natural language, isn't it a nightmare then to keep all lines 80 characters if you edit previous sentences or insert a word somewhere?