 Magnificent Markdown
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Many websites, ours included, use a lightweight markup language to dynamically serve structurally valid XHTML to the visitors browser.
Wikipedia is probably the most famous example of a dynamic website relying on a lightweight markup language for content production. In their own words:
“A lightweight markup language is a markup language with a simple syntax, designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form. Lightweight markup languages are used in applications where people might be expected to read the document source as well as the rendered output. For instance, a person downloading a software library might prefer to read the documentation in a text editor rather than a browser.”
We love lightweight markup languages, especially something as elegant and intuitive as Markdown. It leaves us free to focus on the content, instead of the layout and presentation. Markdown Extra takes this one step further, with it’s support for simple tables and definition lists as well as the ability to have Markdown text inside “normal” HTML block tags.
The Markdown syntax takes less than 10 minutes to learn and once you’ve learnt it, you’ll never forget it. Who needs a WYSIWYG editor when you’ve got something as magnificent as this?
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