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the sauna picture was a weird example though…
Interesting stuff, but my main takeaway is that very little of my output is worth keeping! (Who’s going to need out-of-context Star Trek shitposts in 20 years?)
That website was the fastest loading website I’ve ever visited.
You will probably be a fan of https://kagi.com/, then. I know it’s what I first noticed and what stood out to me a couple years back…
I pay for and use kagi, but it is one of the slowest websites I use, so I am not really sure what this comment is referencing? Is it fast for others?
Hm, really? Curios, because it most definitely is quite fast for me… May I ask (very approximately) what region you’re living in? Maybe they lack a data center “nearby”?
I am connected to their US-East server, with a latency often around 70. Not really sure where that datacenter is, but I am in southern Ontario, Canada. We often get put onto servers in New York or around there.
To this day, most of what I do is just in plaintext with indentation and - denoting lists. I can still read my notes from literal decades ago without issue. Markdown adds an unnecessary step for my personal notekeeping.
I migrated from mediawiki to markdown in git 8 years ago and never looked back. The ability to publish to any number of static site hosts, and use any number of editors, some that have preview mode, is rad. Data liberty, data portability, wide support, easy to convert, easy to grep, good enough for 95% of written notes.
My biggest gripe is poor support for tables of data.
Man alive, all that time I wasted learning LaTeX in that case. Supports tables properly, “floats” pictures and figures about without messing up the flow of text, exceptional support for equations, beautiful printed output…
Suffers from a completely insane macro-writing language, and its markup is more intrusive in the text than markdown’s is. Also, if you have very specific formatting output requirements (for a receiving publication, for instance) then it can be somewhat painful to whip into shape. Plain-text gang forever, though.
haaave you heard about our lord and saviour Typst?
same layout algorithm as LaTeX, but:
- simpler markup
- sane, consistent scripting language
- fast compilation, including incremental updates so you can have a process watching your file and instantly create a new PDF on changes
- easy collaborative editing through their web app
- actually understandable error messages
I wholly disagree with this after using markdown for everything for a few reasons, but it may work for some people if you really love operating from a basic CLI. Some people also get by with storing everything in plain-text files as well. Why not, plain-text will still be supported as well.
Markdown, especially CommonMark, will likely never provide what you want. Is it convenient when you have hundreds or thousands of files to manually manage? Most likely you’ll constantly be searching for ways to make markdown work more like a word processor & CMS, because what you really want is a powerful WYSIWYG content management platform.
I’m not going to judge someone if they are content with basic markdown. It isn’t my place to. But to make a statement like, “if it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown” is preaching from a bubble.
The articles point was that markdown (or other similar utf-8 text based documents) is the best guarantee you have for the files being usable into the indefinite future. As you get into the complicated formats of things like word processors the less likely that format will be meaningfully usable in 10,20,50 years time, good luck reading a obsolete word processor file from the 80s today.
LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine. What didn’t last was the compact diskettes that some of them were lost to.
WordPerfect really comes from a different time. Good look reading the stuff from your iOS notes app that saves everything somewhere in the cloud and that has no export option in 10 years.
Preposterous. You need only install the iCloud client, and they (along with everything else in your iCloud drive) sync just fine.
Like I said, the files are in a standardized format. You can literally extract & view the content yourself. Do you want extensively structured data in 10, 20 or 50 years, or do you want only the most basic? If something is important enough for you to save for that long, you prob should put some effort into making it useful. I’m not saying word processors are perfect, but almost every markdown editor out there is essentially trying to recreate a word processor.
CommonMark includes like 6 levels of headings, blockquotes, code blocks, bold, italics, hyperlinks, HRs, and lists? At what cost though? Which heading is the title, which one is the subtitle? Now you want to add frontmatter, which is not part of the CommonMark spec. What if you don’t want a thousand files, will your editor support multiple pages in a single file with multiple frontmatter declarations? Now you want a table, guess you’re going to deviate to GFM. What if you want to use callouts, etc.
Things like Lexical is promising:
https://playground.lexical.dev/
I’d rather have a single SQLite file that has my entire knowledgebase in a useful CMS than having a thousand markdown files that I have no clue what I titled them 10 or 20 years ago. So much easier to manage, rename things, etc.
WYSIWYG, Word Processors and CMSs are the kind of thing I don’t even want for my current content (or any content I made in the last 25+ years), why would I want any of them as an archive format?
Why not just use plain text then? I mean if your important content can be summarized into the most basic structure, why not just create your own markup format that makes sense to you? Makes no sense why you’d limit yourself to CommonMark.
Sure does; other people understand it too.
Your kids in 20 years trying to find your will, will love you.
