On 2026-01-17 05:46, Didier Kryn wrote:

>     I thought Markdown, on the contrary, was about lightweight. I
> wonder how it is possible for a markdown document to refer to so many
> external files to display. I even thought it was designed to not need
> graphics capability to display. It seems it has been corrupted, only
> keeping simple the formatting syntax.

You misunderstand the point of a lightweight markup language. The
general philosophy behind them all is to provide a minimum "reasonable"
feature set which can be reduced to a format which is feature-obvious
and easy on the eyes, where reasonable is determine separately by each.
It's a response to how HTML is kind of silly and ugly for basic
communication.

bold/strong, emphasis/italics, ordered/unordered lists, table, etc. are
common. Two features exist in Markdown which are your complaint: Image
references and recognizing (at least some) HTML and passing its
interpretation to the display.

For the bash/shell bibles, they just take advantage of files being easy
to point to, leaving the renderer (in this case GitHub) to build HTML
which embeds images for your web browser.

It's wholly optional. When I write in text files, I use Markdown for
coloured syntax highlighting in my text editor. I drop some things into
a spreadsheet as Markdown even though spreadsheet cannot understand the
syntax; the plain text "formatting" still works well unrendered.

This looks good to me in a spreadsheet:

- A list _with some italics_.

I suppose one would say if you don't like embedded images or other
features, don't use them. If your renderer doesn't understand images
(e.g. an offline web browser, or if you didn't clone the repo to get the
images) then it'll do whatever it chooses to; maybe display nothing at
all or a placeholder image.

Notably all wikis are empowered by a limited markup language (e.g.
Wikipedia uses "Wikitext") because HTML editing is kind of like asking
everyone to style their Perl code the same. There's still a balance
between simplicity and features though, and your observation is that
Markdown is referencing and rendering images in non-textfile ways; fair
point, but a powerful (optional) tool.