Get 'Down, make love!
I'd seen references to John Gruber's Markdown plugin on the Blosxom mailing list, and I hadn't been too impressed. Woo-hoo, I thought, another "simplification" of HTML syntax.
His manifesto, Dive Into Markdown, though, made me interested enough to try it. To summarize: HTML source is easy to write, but it can be a pain in the ass to read. Markdown sets out to use traditional e-mail and Usenet formatting conventions for basic text markup functionality, allowing any web text--but particularly blog entries--to be edited as intuitively as e-mail, and to be stored and transmitted in an easy-to-read plaintext format. It's elegant, it's well thought-out, and it handles mixing HTML with Markdown gracefully. I'm particularly impressed with the cool and flexible syntax for hyperlinks
I've been using it for a few days now, and I'm now an eager convert. As of last night, the comments form also uses it, thanks to Greg Vario's miniscule patch. Feel free to play with it and try it out. You may want to start by viewing the source for this very post.
And yeah, Jarrett, you no longer have to do your own <p> tags.
comment by redbeard:
Yay!
Line breaks ahoy!
comment by Dre:
I'm confused about what the long XML stuff at the beginning had to do with Markdown.
But as for the idea that there should be something lighter weight than HTML, that's been around for a while, and most wikis implement something along those lines.
javascript popups don't work in w3m. they suck.
let us see how markdown handles accents: I want to eat crêpes.
comment by Sebbo:
I'm confused about what the long XML stuff at the beginning had to do with Markdown.
I's a manifesto--it's supposed to ramble. He summarizes his point at the end:
This is a lead-in to the explanation that the problem of prose composition in HTML isn't that it's hard to write, but that it's hard to read.
The thing for me that distinguishes Markdown from its siblings is that habits from e-mail carry over so well. It's certainly not enormously innovative--just well designed and elegant.
javascript popups don't work in w3m. they suck.
Looking at my server logs, I'd almost suspect that you browsed the site in Firefox, then switched to w3c so you could kvetch about the Javascript. No doubt this is an erronious impression. At any rate, aren't you glad that I provided you with a link to the full syntax description so you wouldn't miss anything?