Wondering if your typical/average/normie person (millennials and younger) know it or know about it. It’s enabled on reddit and discord?
No, they use the WYSIWYG editor it has.
I am a big fan of markdown though.
Did you know you can nest these?
That's right, someone could make a choose your own adventure game this way
They did not nest properly on boost. But I guess that’s not surprising, we only just recently got them at all
It works fine on the lemmy-ui, I’d say you should raise an issue.
Didn’t work on Jerboa either, when I opened the top level spoiler it also opened the nested one.
Nope, no chance.
The issue for a long time was that there is no markdown standard, so everyone had their own version of it.
CommonMark is gaining ground, so hopefully markdown will be the same everywhere soon
Without clicking, I know exactly what one this is lol
No
Maybe?
Nah
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I think less than 50% of people with access to technology are tech literate enough to know what markdown is. I don’t think age really applies here so much as interest in technology.
Just because I drive a car doesn’t mean I know or care about how it works. It’s just a tool.
I would even say less than 5%
Lol, yeah. I’m probably being too optimistic.
Well, 5% is less than 50%
Are you telling me you can’t identify some of the common symptoms of a failing alternator!? Pshhhh…
:P
You’re a towel.
…could you please elaborate?
Dumb joke that’s from South Park. There’s a towel, and any time someone calls him a towel, he retorts with, “you’re a towel”.
I need to watch more South park. 😂
No, the average person struggles with WYSIWYG editors
I hate it when someone dumps their log file without using a code block. Even seen some Arch Linux users do it, which is, unsurprising really.
Yes, no, maybe.
I don’t know.
Can you repeat the question?
Nope. Most tech people don’t know what markdown is.
I would guess they know a bit about lists using “-“ and a few people might know about using asterisk to bold stuff, but other than that probably not.
No
And quartz, of course.
Of course.
Not Markdown as a whole, but I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold. Some also know how to
crossthe text. Not much more for a normie, though.I guess they commonly know to use asterisks for italics and bold
I wouldn’t guess that at all. Pretty much everyone I know in the “normie” world would AT BEST use ctrl-i and ctrl-b if they’re not just pressing the icon in the gui.
Hell, most of them look at me like I’m a goddamn morlock when I tell them to Shift-delete in order to skip the recycling bin.
Yeah, I’m a normie, I’m tech literate adjacent-adjacent, by which I mean I’m here on lemmy rather than Facebook, but no. Me and my peers are not pressing ctrl anything. I don’t even know what gui means. Something user interface? I’m not proud to be this dumb, but I’m pretty sure most “regular” people are in this boat with me. I was the third most tech literate person in my entire office last year with a bunch of millennials simply because I was willing to Google things.
Most IT nowadays is just simply the ability to google. What sets a professional IT person apart from an amateur is that the professional has an educated guess as to what to google in the first place.
Non-professional: “My computer is making a weird buzzing noise”
Professional: “What are the symptoms of a bad cooling fan?”
You mean ̶s̶t̶r̶i̶k̶e̶t̶̶h̶r̶o̶u̶g̶h̶? Yeah. It can be done without markdown.
Those are usually broken on screen readers.
OIC. I should have thought about that.
And here I was considering making this the default way of doing a strikethrough.On the other hand, perhaps we should update the screen readers to make that work. Maybe it can be added as a category of stuff that is to be explained separately.
The least I can do is install a screen reader and know what it does with this.
Google Translate’s “Listen” option seems to work well with it though.
Yeah, that exactly. Not a native speaker, huh
Most people are probably at least aware that there are contexts where their basic plain-text formatting (like asterisks for bullets) will get cleaned up to a prettier format when they post it.
They may not know the name of the format or all the available features.
Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is:
-
To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. “Mark that down in your notes, so we don’t forget.”
-
A discount or sale. “Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?”
And yet you just used it! Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like:
- Numbering your items
- will automatically format them
- into ordered lists
- and if you use
-
it’s an unordered list
- same with asterisk
Still don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
Markdown is a markup language, which can be used by users to indicate formatting hints to the underlying system. For example, you want a text to be bold, a markup language lets you tell that to the website in a way it understands.
Older markup languages tended to be verbose and complicated. For example, this is a numbered list in BBCode, which is the classic forum markup language:
[ol][li]Item one[/li][li]Item two[/li][/ol]
.Markdown keeps it simple and intuitive, for the most part.
1. item 1 2. item 2
The above is a numbered list in Markdown. Much simpler than the BBCode version. Simple enough that people like you can do it without even being aware of Markdown at all.
*This is cursive text* **This is bold text** # this is a heading ## this is a smaller heading ###### usually up to six levels are supported, but this might differ based on the implementation (my instance seems to make all of these the same size) > this is a quote it can span multiple lines too this is a bullet point list: - item 1 - item 2 [Links are more complicated, but still as easy as they can be](https://example.org/)
The above doesn’t actually display formatted because I used a code block to show the Markdown as written. The below is how the above actually displays:
This is cursive text This is bold text
this is a heading
this is a smaller heading
usually up to six levels are supported, but this might differ based on the implementation (my instance seems to make all of these the same size)
this is a quote it can span multiple lines too
this is a bullet point list:
- item 1
- item 2
Links are more complicated, but still as easy as they can be
edit: this is what the original creator of Markdown has to say on the matter:
Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible.
Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email.
To this end, Markdown’s syntax is comprised entirely of punctuation characters, which punctuation characters have been carefully chosen so as to look like what they mean. E.g., asterisks around a word actually look like emphasis. Markdown lists look like, well, lists. Even blockquotes look like quoted passages of text, assuming you’ve ever used email.
You typed some text to make your first comment, and it looked something like this:
Elder Millennial here. All I know about markdown is: 1. To make a hard copy of a thought or conversation. "Mark that down in your notes, so we don't forget." 2. A discount or sale. "Did you see the 30% markdown on three legged jeans?"
The way your comment actually displays is different though, isn’t it? The numbered items are indented and come one after the other without any space inbetween, and the text within each numbered item is properly aligned.
What you entered is just text, and text by itself is inherently meaningless. “Markdown” is the name of a particular standard way of formatting text so that programs can reliably interpret parts of that text as representing the writers desire for their text to be displayed a particular way. You can kind of think of it like a programming language. As another basic example, consider this text:
This is a paragraph. This is still the same paragraph. Here is the second one. And here is the third one.
I’m going to paste this text right after this sentence; notice how the amount of space doesn’t matter, and how a new paragraph is denoted by at least two line breaks.
This is a paragraph. This is still the same paragraph.
Here is the second one.
And here is the third one.
I read all that and I must admit I am still not quite sure what part of all that is markdown, and why any of it is markdown.
I get that this sentence must be the key concept: ““Markdown” is the name of a particular standard way of formatting text so that programs can reliably interpret parts of that text as representing the writers desire for their text to be displayed a particular way.” But it reads like a tautology without really explaining either statement.
Everything I wrote “is Markdown”, because the program you’re using to view my text assumes that my text is formatted in Markdown. You too are writing in Markdown, which for example is how your comment got displayed in bold. You did not “type boldly” to do that, you typed some text like
**this is bold**
and that got displayed in bold.Maybe more examples would help. Here’s something I can do because the program you’re using to view my text assumes it’s Markdown:
this is a monospace font
and this is not. This desire for my text to be displayed in a monospace font is expressed in Markdown using grave quotes. It’s common to use this to denote literal, unprocessed text, so I would say that what I typed was`this is a monospace font`
. If you copy and paste that text into a comment, do nothing else to it, and post it, you will see it displayed asthis is a monospace font
without the quotes because a Markdown compatible program sees it and knows “this person wants the text between these grave quotes displayed monospace”.You can also see where I just wrote “without” italicized; in Markdown this is expressed as
*without*
or_without_
.If I type
* Thing 1 * Thing 2 * Thing 3
You’ll see this displayed with bullets, not asterisks, and proper indenting and vertical spacing for a list:
-
Thing 1
-
Thing 2
-
Thing 3
It also gets displayed in exactly the same way if I write it in these two different ways as well:
* Thing 1 * Thing 2 * Thing 3
- Thing 1
- Thing 2
- Thing 3
* Thing 1 * Thing 2 * Thing 3
-
Thing 1
-
Thing 2
-
Thing 3
Maybe it would be helpful to just skim through a Markdown spec. (There are different flavors of Markdown; this one is called CommonMark, which is usually what people actually mean when they say Markdown. More information on their website.)
-
I am, also, an elder millennial and confused. Maybe it’s just some form of problem solving/way to sort your thoughts or options?
Some parts of markdown were made to be intuitive and natural like
And then other parts of it are just infuriating. Like how if you try to post song lyrics or something, the markdown just mashes every sentence together in one line for some reason. So you have to know the secret code just to make gdamn new lines. I actually pressed enter to go to a new line 5 times in this paragraph but it comes out all jumbled together after posting.
As far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t need to know some special formatting just for return to work properly.
And then you’re on your phone, and typing two spaces at the end of each line is a mess because your keyboard insists you really want punctuation and a space. Because why would you end a sentence with two spaces. Gah.
Any Elder Millennial born after 1979 can’t Markdown, all they know is jot that down, 30% off on jeans, nostalgia for blockbuster, eat hot chip and buy avocado toast
30% markdown on three legged jeans? Damn, that’s almost one whole leg for free!
-