Why does markdown always format bullets wrong?

No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 36 points – 10 months ago

I've noticed this on a lot of places that use Markdown. The bullet points have more space above than they do below. This makes it confusing visually because it looks like the text is associated with the item below, even though logically it should be related to the item above.

You can see this happening on my lemmy post here (https://lemmy.ca/post/11285664), but it also happens in other markdown based apps like Joplin

So why was it designed like that? Is it meant to convey something, or is there a way that we are supposed to use Markdown to prevent that?

As a quick example, see here:

List item A
List item B
- List item B.1
- List item B.2
List item C

It's due to shitty rendering of Markdown. You're doing it right. File bugs where you see it rendered funny.

i think if you put less whitespace in between it will format a bit better?

A
B
- Sub 1
- Sub 2
C
- Another Sub 1
- Another Sub 2
D
E

Oh huh

Is there any way to keep some spacing?

Like this

- A
  - sub 1
  - sub 2

- B

Sentence about C
  - detail 1C
  - detail 2C

Similar issues come up if I have sentences with bullet points:

Here is some information

detail 1
detail 2

Here is the next bit of information

detail 1
detail 2

it doesn't appear to be easy to do either of those, from some quick testing. Looks like the <p></p> tags have bottom spacing which is causing the issue, mainly, at least in lemmy's case. weird.

Is there any way to keep some spacing?

  will add an empty row, if that's whats you meant. That's what I currently use.

So in your example:

Here is some information

detail 1
detail 2

 

Here is the next bit of information

... will turn into:

Here is some information

detail 1
detail 2

Here is the next bit of information

That will work, thank you!

1 more...

Joplin, at least, will accept CSS formatting to correct some of this. You can also brute force it with HTML <br> tags.

Also due to markdown being a very badly defined “spec”.

I disagree. It isn’t badly defined, although vanilla Markdown includes some awkward choices. A few have been revised in other versions. But as a markup system that’s also human-readable, it’s a pretty handy tool.

CommonMark itself even claims that markdown doesn't have a spec, so not sure you can claim it's not badly defined. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.30/#why-is-a-spec-needed-

asciidoc is much better defined, has hardly any edge cases, supports vastly more features, and is a lot easier to use (the lack of a spec doesn't ever get in the way)

Well, there’s the replacement then.

CommonMark has been out for almost a decade and still isn’t used ubiquitously, while asciidoc is standard everywhere.