I don't get it.
TBH most of the time I find markdown's collapsing of whitespace annoying - if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line. And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?) so some renderers don't respect it (and IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it, i.e. doesn't do semantic line breaks)
Another pet hate is text editors which auto-convert double space into ". " - I find this even cropping up in IDEs now, so you try to add an end of line comment "...] # here" and it turns into "...]. # here". Awful
> if you want a 'visual' line-break you have to add unnatural double space at the end of preceding line.
That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part. CommonMark adds trailing backslash as an alternative, so that will work in most places these days.
> And even this is renderer dependent, I don't think is part of the spec (?)
Yes it is. Quoting https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax: “When you do want to insert a <br /> break tag using Markdown, you end a line with two or more spaces, then type return.”
> IIRC GitHub comments renderer does't need it
Yes, GitHub decided on a wilful violation of Markdown for issues and discussions.
> text editors which auto-convert double space into ". "
I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
> > text editors which auto-convert double space into ". "
> I have seen that as a feature on Android keyboards, but I would be very much surprised to find it in non-keyboard software.
It just happened to me in VS Code! Not even a Copilot thing
[a few moments later...]
It turns out to be a macOS system setting, defaulted to on, that is polluting everywhere
https://github.com/AdamMaras/vscode-overtype/issues/9#issuec...
Fun. That shuffling of its location in Ventura reminds me of how Windows has shifted some things over time, sometimes more than once or twice. The dialog where you can stop Ctrl+Shift from switching keyboard layout has been in at least eight different places over time <https://superuser.com/q/109066>, possibly more.
> That’s just a bad syntax choice on Gruber’s part.
I believe Gruber was inspired by how people wrote emphasis in plain text emails and other text documents. Most MUA at the time would treat trailing whitespace as a hard rather than soft line break. This is from my--now aging--memory, and I can't find a source to corroborate. I do recall, though, there were clients that didn't do it well (ahem, Outlook), and would break plain text formatting of deeply-nested quoted text. (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
> (Don't even get me started on how Outlook single-handedly changed culture from bottom posting to top posting).
Or how it single-handedly kept HTML for email frozen with an incomplete and buggy implementation of HTML 3.2 from 1997…