Markdown
Comments: 11
Markdown by John Gruber (creator of the beloved SmartyPants) looks intriguing. I must carve out the time for a close look.
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Posted to Computers • 2004.03.11 (Thu) • 09:37
Comments
Posted by Wes Carr 2004.03.11, 12:21
Something similar that has been around for quite a while is Textile and there is a Movabletype plugin for it as well.
Posted by dowingba 2004.03.11, 15:12
I’ve heard that the original Textile was somehow inspired by SmartyPants or something. And I happen to use the MT Textile plugin and it uses SmartyPants (if you have SmartyPants installed).
I don’t understand how this MarkDown thing adds anything to the situation. MT-Textile (and presumably Textile) is so incredibly perfect. Why make another plugin that does essentially the same thing (but much less efficiently, judging by the write-up on that site).
The syntax for this thing is about 90% as hard to learn as just learning HTML. And if you already know HTML, what’s the point? Italics are this rather than this? Whoa, that’s much easier! When it gets to links and lists, HTML is actually simpler than this thing. Reminds me of the Smarty templating system, that is 90% as hard as just using PHP to to the job, and is just something else to learn.
Posted by MacDara 2004.03.11, 19:45
I agree, setting lists and blockquotes is a pain in the neck using the Textile syntax, but that’s where the == comes in.
Posted by Lukasz 2004.03.11, 21:58
Oh gosh, there are so many of these. The best one, IMO, is txt2tag - I’ve been using it for some time but quitted it recently for the sake of MT.
Posted by Jack 2004.03.11, 22:01
Personally, I installed MT-Textile so I didn’t have to code blockquotes and lists. It’s quite hard to validly and semantically insert blockquotes and lists without Textile because you would need to disable MT’s “Convert Line Breaks” (and then you’d need to code in the
tags manually too).
example of Textile syntax:
bq. This text will be in a blockquote
- This text
- will be in
- an unordered list.
Posted by Noah 2004.03.12, 01:18
Right. Anyway, what I like about Markdown, aside from its easy integration into BBEdit and MovableType, is its ability to do URL referencing, which makes it a great tool for pages that see a lot of revisions, and they can go anywhere in the page as well. Such as:
….lots of code in-between… More great photos of Japan from Jeremy have been posted.
Posted by Ryan Johnson 2004.03.12, 10:16
Re: Smarty/Textile comment…
Being in the midst of writing a CMS, I can safely say that smarty is a life saver. Go download half a dozen PHP web apps and try to pop them into your site. Odds are, it will take a hell of a lot of work because the logic is mixed with the code. If you don’t understand the value of seperating “business logic” from presentation logic, you haven’t written a large application. I would never use smarty on a small site, or even a small application, but it’s essential to seperate the presenation from the code on a larger application.
As for Textile and Markdown, I love them. Textile does more, but the syntax isn’t quite as nice. My vote is for markdown, for the style in which it links things up.
But as for why the are nessecary… If you’re reading and commenting about this stuff, you’re probably pretty well versed in HTML/CSS/PHP/perl/whatever. Most people who are surfing the web these days aren’t. I use my girlfriend as the first tester for everything I build because she doesn’t know jack about computers. When I set her up with a weblog,
ThisAnd this and [this][l1] is going to be a hell of a lot easier for her to learn.
Than putting in h1 and href tags. Plus, the source is human readable (very much so compared to HTML anyway). I agree fully that if you know HTML already, that it’s one extra step, but I think that Mark has totally hit the nail on the head with this thing, it’s easier than HTML in my opinion, and objectively better than textile in a lot of ways. Bravo Mark!
Posted by UltraBob 2004.03.12, 18:02
Yeah, Mark and his application Johndown. ;)
Posted by Joseph 2004.03.12, 22:59
Markdown is not for everyone, and it does arrive at a point where people are firmly committed to their own particular solutions for the problems it is designed to address.
Personally I think it’s yummy, largely because it draws upon conventions tested in email and usenet posts. The idea that my content is sitting on my server in a thoroughly human-readable format is just tantalising for the geek in me.
Plus, I’m a sucker for a clever name.
Posted by Sunny 2004.03.18, 11:20
Markdown is a very clever tool and although it can serve the same purpose as Textile, it can be more.
A Markdown syntaxed page doesn’t look anything like an html page. To the casual reader it is just like normal text or plain vanilla email. But with the markdown filter, that same page can be transformed to structurally sound html.
Textile has “tags” which are converted to html equivalent. But the Markdown markup (sorry) is seemingly no tags. Underlined text gets converted to a headline, asterisks are converted to necessary emphasis. To a normal eye its just text sans formating but ultimately very readeable and minus tags. It is as if the markup is hidden, the tags behind a veil! In all pretty neat!
My apologies if the above makes no sense. Experiment it with the online demo to get a drift of what its all about.
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