If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
p.migdal.pl If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
Why and how to preserve digital content in plaintext format for long-term accessibility and reuse
60 comments
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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.
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That website was the fastest loading website I’ve ever visited.
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I felt like I was back in the 2000s when I first got cable internet, but before ads took over everything.
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That thing loaded before I even click the link.
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You made me click the link out of pure skepticism. You were not exaggerating.
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You'd like the mcmaster-carr website.
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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…
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It loaded quicker than this comment section on my Lemmy app
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Static webpage generator like Hugo, probably.
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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?)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Agree and disagree. There is a place for sophisticated management tools but when they stop getting supported or they're purchase by a company you hate, you're left scrambling to convert everything.
Best case for me anyway are sophisticated tools that use markdown as the basis of their files like Obsidian. So I know if they disappear I still have all my data in a universal format without any effort on my end.
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The important thing is that it needs to be in a human-readable format encoded as unicode text. Beyond that, any reasonable markup (plaintext, markdown, org-mode, HTML, etc.) is fine.
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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?
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The problem with Markdown is it kind of sucks. CommonMark didn't even defragment the markdown world, since there are numerous incompatible extensions. It seems like gfm is the best among them, or at least the most featureful.
I know there are other options like RST or AsciiDoc, but I don't know which among them is actually "the best."
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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.
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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
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Now that sounds interesting!
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I have a tendency to jump between different note-taking services. Markdown seems like it could maybe be a cure for me.. By now i have no idea where I should look for a note I know I’ve taken, is it in notion, onenote, apple notes, and so on..
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gotta hop on obsidian, everybody's doin it
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Obligatory Logseq vote
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I've tried a few different note taking apps but I'm sticking with obsidian even though it is not open source because it saves everything in a simple folder structure as markdown files and simple images. I like that even without the program you can just search for the names of the images or notes on your system.
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I use Obsidian with Zettel Notes on my phone to access and edit the MD files in Obsidian, as it is much faster for dashing off a quick note. ZN also has tools that allow you to save a web page or selection as MD which is very handy indeed.
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No print it, everything digital needs a fairly complex machinery to work.
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Do both and use the digital copy to print a new physical copy every x years.
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Handwritten HTML with limited tags works just as well for many purposes (just forbid div, span, and a few others and the complexity you see in most webpages evaporates). The important part is using a text-based format from which information can be extracted even if the fancier display protocols become obsolete.
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Which is markdown
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Not really. HTML has a formal standard and definition that covers how to properly handle most corner cases that can arise when displaying it. Markdown has no overarching formal standard and exists in multiple dialects which are not always compatible with each other.
On the gripping hand, HTML involves more keystrokes (and technically speaking you need to include a bit of boilerplate in the file for it to be proper HTML). So it depends on whether you're willing to do a bit more typing to make sure that no one can possibly confuse your italics with boldface.
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the sauna picture was a weird example though...
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Was Is
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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.
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AFAIK there's no way to format an underline in markdown.
Anyone know of a workaround?
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Think html renders. May not be exactly right but where I'd start
<s>
There will be a few tickets available at the box office tonight.</s>
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See, this is why I'm sticking with pen and paper for the really important stuff.
No offence to the apps themselves, I find them especially useful when I need to transfer info from one device to another. But I do not trust anything purely digital for long-term to permanent archiving, especially not Cloud solutions.
Also significantly more reliable in case said info need not see the light of day. Just sayin'.
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Paper is just about the easiest thing to lose over the years and it certainly doesn't last forever. You are one bit of water damage, one fire, one break-in,... away from losing it all permanently with paper.
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60 comments