why do I prefer HTML over markdown?
I really don't understand the hype about markdown:
- It is very hard to parse
- It does not have a lot of features built-in like tables, hence there are a lots of extentions
- a lot of features are missing, for example you cannot set alignment of text or set width of an image
The downsides mentioned above are kind of bi-directional, meaning one influences the other. for example, missing a lots of features causes variant extentions, having too many extentions makes markdown parser libraries more complex and a lot of them not supporting the features you may want. or having a wierd syntax makes it a lot harder to write a parser for it.
You may argue that you can just write custom HTML wherever you want, but why don't write HTML from scratch??
one time I used a markdown parser happily with english and ASCII characters, but then I used it for another language like Arabic and it would not able to parse. maybe you'd argue that it is because of the programmer did not pay attention to Unicode characters; correct, but I say it is less likely to happen in XML or HTML parser because of its obvious syntax.
Not to mention markdown viewers often do not support Arabic and they shows you a real mess when you want to write left to right words in right to left languages.
So, instead of writing .md and then converting it to .html,
I've decided to just write raw HTML, in this way, I don't need a
super extensible markdown library with built-in support of feature 1 and feature 2 which I don't care at
all.
HTML is a
MarkUp Language in contrast to
MarkDown,
I'll bet you haven't heard of tags such as
<blockquote> for quotation
or
<cite>
or even
<kbd> for keyboard shortcuts.
The list goes on but HTML already has lots of things you are looking for in the document format
since long time ago.
why bother yourself to write a program to convert a limited format into a rich format?
You can pick your favorite code editor and with setting up some code suggestions and installing expand region extention, be very happy with writing raw HTML. Plus, you don't need to convert it in order to see it!