The Woes of Writing Markdown (And the wishes of SquiggleMark) is an essay about some of the technical and artistic challenges inherent to writing ergodic text using markup language. I posted her story Weave Me Another Cocoon last year[0], and it's a fantastic example of how art can push the limits of a medium.
> But the real superpower of pandoc is that, much in the way switching to neocities escapes the prison-roads of locked down platforms, switching to pandoc escapes at once the restrictions of both rich text and standard markdown.
> If you aren’t familiar with my work, then when I said I loved the details disclosure element, or that I’m experimental writer doing creative things, you could have brushed it off as a cute yet idle exclamation or an otherwise meaningless remark. If you aren’t familiar, then gaze upon Weave Me Another Cocoon and let its depths ensnare you.
> And that, finally, is what this year started me down the road to writing my own markdown parser.
The "indented codeblocks" trap is real. That rule alone has caused me more rendering edge cases than I'd like to admit.
Funnily enough I ended up in a similar place but from the viewer side. Existing markdown viewers on windows either required installing heavy runtimes or didn't render things consistently. Ended up building my own too. There's something about markdown that keeps pushing people from "I'll just use an existing tool" to "fine I'll build it myself".
The style vs procedure thing you brought up is interesting tho. On the rendering side you hit the same tension, should the viewer interpret a custom class as a visual hint or just pass it through?
gryfft•2h ago
> But the real superpower of pandoc is that, much in the way switching to neocities escapes the prison-roads of locked down platforms, switching to pandoc escapes at once the restrictions of both rich text and standard markdown.
> If you aren’t familiar with my work, then when I said I loved the details disclosure element, or that I’m experimental writer doing creative things, you could have brushed it off as a cute yet idle exclamation or an otherwise meaningless remark. If you aren’t familiar, then gaze upon Weave Me Another Cocoon and let its depths ensnare you.
> And that, finally, is what this year started me down the road to writing my own markdown parser.
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44143596