Good points. That made me realize that I’m probably not really expressing well what I’m after. Indeed I should not tell the md crowd or devs what to do for the sake of just md. As a standalone tool, say the quick and dirty notes you mention, I can take it or leave it. And hence, for outside DT, my go-to quick and dirty note tool is Apple Notes. It could be Draft. You name it.
But once a format is adopted within a larger system, then format choices will go away. Let me try to illustrate that:
Jupyter devs chose md as their rich-text format. Great, especially with embedded LaTeX math, it’s very handy. But my use case to make powerful Jupyter documents for my research makes good (i.e. painlessly easy to use) image usage (and also tables) a must. Other than Mathematica there is no other tool out there that would do the job. So all those “tons of formats that can handle images just fine” become irrelevant. I’m chained to md because of Jupyter.
Now, in DT, the use of md docs is not mandatory, but it is compelling. An editable document format is particularly useful in DT when it is
- indexable
- viewable within DT (ideally natively, but at least with a preview mechanism)
- editable within DT (for fast workflow)
(text, rtf, rtfd, formatted notes, md) fullfil all 3, whereas Pages and Word fulfill (1), (2) partly, but not (3). Md is in my view the best of the first group, and so, for a DT user, it assumes the de facto role of the most capable, most future-proof (cf. rtf) internal document creator/editor/viewer. And that’s why many people clamour for certain features in it. At that point, the history and philosophy behind it take a back seat. People notice that it’s a cool format, and so close to doing what they want or need. And then they notice that in mmd, a lot of features do eventually show up, so it’s not that devs are very principled either. That at least partially excuses why people suggest features.
The introduction of image assets in DT md, either by dragging a file in or by pasting an image, was a game changer to me. I still would not mind at all the ability to scale the image, but I understand that that’s beyond DT, without breaking md compatibility (unless they spearhead another mmd flavour).
And I was then particular excited to find that I can collect all my image assets in one, x-item-referenced, location, which makes for my use case (and only mine!) the use entirely foolproof. I hindsight, I should have just pointed out the ability to put a slash in front of the asset folder name to make the location absolute. I should have abstained from remarking on the (factual) non-universality of the group-based location, which has its own advantages, as was pointed out.
