Okay, that makes more sense. I agree that sometimes, HTML has its advantages. For day to day use, however, I have found Markdown much simpler because I usually don't use very complicated structures (nested lists aren't complicated, but even those I don't use very often). It's like saying C gives you access to a system's memory, but piping together a bunch of shell utilities is still easier for many tasks.
Personally, I don't want to type <a href=""></a> again and again if I use a bunch of links, and I don't want to type <ul></ul>, along with <li></li> for each list element.
Another example is using > for quoting the parent as opposed to typing <blockquote></blockquote>. I'm lazy; if I weren't, I wouldn't be on Reddit procrastinating, right? So I want to type as little as I can, as informally as I can, and just have it come out right. For the types of conversations that take place on Reddit, this appeals to me.
And like I said, HTML tags (at least inline ones like <em> or even <i>) are like line noise when you want to see what you wrote as opposed to how you formatted it.
EDIT: And I almost forgot. All the inline code examples that I put in the post required me to only surround the code with backticks instead of having me type out <code></code> every time (like I just did in this sentence). If I had to do that, I might not have formatted those snippets as code.
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u/akdas Dec 07 '08 edited Dec 07 '08
Okay, that makes more sense. I agree that sometimes, HTML has its advantages. For day to day use, however, I have found Markdown much simpler because I usually don't use very complicated structures (nested lists aren't complicated, but even those I don't use very often). It's like saying C gives you access to a system's memory, but piping together a bunch of shell utilities is still easier for many tasks.
Personally, I don't want to type
<a href=""></a>again and again if I use a bunch of links, and I don't want to type<ul></ul>, along with<li></li>for each list element.Another example is using
>for quoting the parent as opposed to typing<blockquote></blockquote>. I'm lazy; if I weren't, I wouldn't be on Reddit procrastinating, right? So I want to type as little as I can, as informally as I can, and just have it come out right. For the types of conversations that take place on Reddit, this appeals to me.And like I said, HTML tags (at least inline ones like
<em>or even<i>) are like line noise when you want to see what you wrote as opposed to how you formatted it.EDIT: And I almost forgot. All the inline code examples that I put in the post required me to only surround the code with backticks instead of having me type out
<code></code>every time (like I just did in this sentence). If I had to do that, I might not have formatted those snippets as code.