this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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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.
LibreOffice opens my old WordPerfect documents just fine. What didn't last was the compact diskettes that some of them were lost to.
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.