My old friend and ex colleague Watts Martin has weighed in on the Markdown issue. Martin is a technical writer and novelist who regularly uses Markdown in his work. Lately, he’s become a bit peevish about the periodic spasms of comments claiming that Markdown isn’t suitable for “serious” writing.
His post is a fairly long article that lays out his reasons for believing that Markdown is the best lightweight markup language for writing. I’ve often said, most recently here, that it is, in fact, Org mode that’s the best lightweight markup language. One of my reasons for believing that is that while there’s only one Org there are several dialects of Markdown. Karl Voit believes that this is a fatal flaw for Markdown.
Martin claims that this is largely a straw man. He says that 99% of the time the various dialects are the same and differ only in edge cases that are easily avoided. He also says that if your goal is simply to make it as easy as possible to write text that you can convert to HTML—and PDF?—nothing is better than Markdown.
You see that argument often in the tech sphere. It’s usually in the form a complaint that application X provides too much information. In this case it’s the argument that other markup languages do too much. I hate that argument. Yes, Org mode and the others can do more than simply provide an easier way to write HTML but you don’t have to use those features. If you want Org mode, say, to do only what Markdown does, there’s nothing stopping you. It’s not harder—it’s simply a matter of ignoring the wider Org capabilities.
Martin also says that he finds Markdown easier to read in its source form. I still believe, as I claimed in my most recent post on the matter, that Markdown and Org mode syntax differ only in trivial ways—although Voit strongly disagrees—and that they’re essentially the same. If anything, I find Org slightly easier to read but that’s probably just a matter of being used to it. My only real complaint against Markdown syntax is that there are widely different markups for producing the same result.
At the end of the day, I think Martin can rest easy. Nobody but the usual ankle biters are claiming that Markdown can’t be used for serious writing. For non-Emacs users it’s probably the best choice. For Emacs users, there’s no reason other than collaboration to prefer it to Org. At least that’s what I think. Of course, if you are an Emacs and Markdown user, Emacs has you covered with markdown-mode.