I’m writing this post in Markdown. Markdown is a language for formatting a piece of writing simply. For example, if I surround something with two asterisks *like this* then it is put in italic. Doing the same thing in HTML requires me to type <i>much more</i>. And visually, in its raw format, markdown makes a lot more sense.

The articles on How a Car Works have gone back-and-forth between HTML and Markdown with every redesign. I’m not even sure what they are stored as now… It’s HTML.

This afternoon I was coding up a system for articles on FrontendHQ and made the decision to go for HTML there too.

I just saw Markdownify, which is a new WYSIWYG-style markdown editor. It made me think that while I love the simplicity of markdown, I’ve given up using it in most use scenarios.

Images

I want control over how my images display in my content. And I usually want them to display in a <figure> tag. Markdown makes both of these hard and hacky.

I also usually want to reference an image from a local library - I don’t want tying in to a absolute URLs. The most recent way I’ve solved this problem is using a custom markdown image tag. For example, in this blog I use {class:something} which just starts to get ridiculous.

Why not HTML?

  1. It’s much more hassle to write by hand. <p> tags are easy but <strong> tags start to get a bit much. So I need a WYSIWYG editor but…
  2. WYSWYG editors still produce mostly horrible markup, and extending them with something like the custom image syntax above becomes a nightmare. That said, I use Redactor on How a Car Works and it works flawlessly and has a nice code mode. But..
  3. WYSIWYG editing is a terrible experience on mobile, and markdown is very efficient.

As ever, it’s horses for courses but this post has reminded me that I really prefer HTML to markdown. I think markdown is solving two problems:

  1. Limiting the set of available formatting (which we then bypass by using html tags directly).
  2. Producing clean HTML markup at the end.

I’m going to explore the latest version of Redactor to see how well it works on mobile.