Interesting. I seem to have hit a nerve in a fascinating way, in terms of hypertext history..

[emsariel]

 

I’m going to fly my nerd flag right now, fair warning. Check out now if you don’t want to get into the digital, textual weeds.

So back in 2020 I made a feature request on the forums for Obsidian, a “a powerful knowledge base on top of
a local folder of plain text Markdown files.” I wanted Obsidian to be interoperable with my wiki that uses .txt files so that I could have them cohabitate on my devices. I love Dokuwiki, but I was in a weird spot: Dokuwiki would use only .txt files; Obsidian would use only .md files, even if the exact same content would work in both. The dream is that you write text somewhere, with appropriate metadata that provides context and meaning; from there, software translates--localizes--what you intended into whatever someone wants to read.

So I requested that Obsidian respect either file extension, end of story.

The feature request (FR) took on a life of its own. After a few weeks where the only reply was a vague dismissal, I checked out. I continued journaling with Day One, which mostly supports Markdown, and continued doing deeper documentation in Dokuwiki, which supports Markdown-in-.txt with a plugin. I got a job that eventually let me push documentation through Confluence.

I came back just now, 1 year and 11 months later, to find that my FR had become a massive thread, with many many supporters and, eventually, support for extensions, it seems. Also, a holy war.

Well, that’s a little grandiose, but it’s not far off for file format arguments. It spawned some real arguments about what file formats are supersets of others, and what that means for syntactic context. Many people use tools that respect Markdown as a syntax, but which require enough other meta- nonsense that they just fall back to using .txt files for the sake of interoperability. .TXT is a superset of Markdown not just in reality (txt files can contain all the characters and meaning in Markdown) but also in intent: Markdown was wri,en to be usable as markup (LOLpun) but also read-as-wri,en. So my request made more sense than I intended: I just wanted Dokuwiki and Obsidian to play nice via FTP; but I touched on how markup and file format are two deeply related, but distinct, concepts. Markdown is remarkable because it allows text to work as well with engines that render markup as those that don’t.

This nuance is completely missing from the later discussion about Obsidian. Clearly, I’m going to have to make a PITA of myself there soon to “add this” to the discussion.

What amuses me to no end is this: I’m writing, via a wiki that specializes in interoperability through .txt files, in/around textuality.org, which is an inadvertent but legitimate TLD pun on textuality.com, which is owned by Tim Bray who helped write XML, the ultimate superset file extension intended to allow authors to define both the syntax and file structure of their content.

So it is EXTREMELY on-brand for me to have kicked off a two-year-long argument about markup and file formats and their syntactic relationships and repercussions. I am mentally fist-pumping and throwing the horns right now.