Re: Markdown Discord/Slack? Just a thought...

[BPJ <melroch-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org>]

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Sorry to say this is probably to a great extent a generational thing. Those
who have grown up with the web and smartphones find the web and apps to be
the "natural" way and appreciate that workflow, while we who used to live
in a pre-smartphone or even a pre-web and/or pre-internet and/or pre-GUI
world appreciate the plaintext work flow and the powers that gives.

Yet it is a bit strange that this dichotomy should make itself felt in the
Pandoc community, since to the probable majority who use Markdown or the
other light-weight markup formats Pandoc supports as input format Pandoc
*is* a plaintext workflow, and I would expect most if not all of us to be
Markdown "literate". Surely we use Pandoc because we prefer to author in
the plaintext-based WYGIWYM formats rather than in a GUI/WYSIWYG? Perhaps
the difference here is whether you view Markdown etc. text/markup solely as
an ancillary format which should be converted to something else before
being presented to the world, or also as a legitimate format for "enriched"
plaintext in its own right, which has an aesthetic of its own, legitimate
to use in plaintext email. (After all Markdown traces its roots to informal
plaintext markup conventions of email and usenet (RIP)!)

I'm perhaps unusual in that I fiercely prefer plaintext and plaintext
editors to menu-driven GUI workflows. In my case the reason for that is
that I suffer from a motor disability which makes using a menu/mouse-driven
GUI somewhat difficult for me — especially if the menus aren't stay-down —,
yet I fully believe that I would prefer a plaintext interface (read: be a
Vim user :-) regardless. Ironically I read most of my email in the Gmail
app on my phone, since I have to lie down for several hours every day, and
tend to use that time for activities which can be conducted on a handheld
device, like reading, whether documents or email. However when *writing*
email I usually switch to an on-phone plaintext editor, write what I need
to write, naturally using Markdown syntax to enrich the semantics of the
text, then paste the result into the Gmail composition window, foregoing
any formatting controls which anyway are hard for me to use, and foregoing
rendering since Pandoc anyway isn't available on my handhelds. Maybe I'm
making a virtue out of a necessity, but I like to believe that it not
*just* that and that I would have been a "plaintext person" anyway.

-- 
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