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Markdown evangelism

In Commentary on 23 March 2007 with 9 comments

I’ve basically decided at this point that whenever I write applications that allow users to enter blocks of text to be displayed on a Web page, I’m going to provide Markdown support. It follows conventions that people have been using in text-based email for years, it’s unobtrusive if you don’t know what it is, it plays nicely with embedded HTML markup, and it takes care of turning line feeds in text into paragraph tags in HTML. Best of all, text with Markdown in it is not only readable, it’s eye pleasing. What’s not to love? I’ve been using Markdown when posting to this site for a long time now, and have included it in some applications, but my thought at this point is, why not include it everywhere?


9 Comments

Bravo, Markdown rocks.

How about also changing the sentence above your comment field, i.e. “you may use HTML tags for style”? We all know HTML tags are for meaning, not style.

Posted by pauldwaite on 24 March 2007 @ 10am

I really do find Textile far more intuitive, and generally much faster to type and use. Not to mention, many of the web services I use and love, like Basecamp, use it already, so it’s intuitive.

Posted by Raymond Brigleb on 24 March 2007 @ 4pm

I like Markdown better than Textile — I think the markup is slightly less intrusive.

Posted by Rafe on 24 March 2007 @ 5pm

I love Markdown, and have even built it into a product, but I wish, 1) there were a Perl module, not just a .pl file; and 2) it were updated once in a while. It seems kind of dead.

Posted by Michael J. on 24 March 2007 @ 5pm

FYI: Markdown got wrapped up into a perl module a while back

http://search.cpan.org/~sri/Text-Markdown-1.0.3/lib/Text/Markdown.pm

There’s also a discussion list that sees sporadic bursts of activity, which implies a markdown 2.0 is being worked on

http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss

Posted by Alan on 24 March 2007 @ 6pm

What do you mean dead? It’s not like something markdown requires updating particularly often.

Posted by ryan on 25 March 2007 @ 7am

I think Markdown is ace. I use it all the time. Practically everything I write is in markdown format and I use it in pretty much every web-site/web application I write.

I wish 37signals would add markdown support in their products. Textile is cool and it’s great that they have support for it, but some people, like me, prefer markdown.

Posted by keith on 25 March 2007 @ 10am

Well, maybe ‘dead’ is too strong, but occasional features might be nice. Tables, for instance, are handled by other tools, and wouldn’t clutter up the syntax too much.

Posted by Michael J. on 25 March 2007 @ 4pm

Thanks for that pointer to the .pm files. I missed that on the mail list.

Posted by michael J. on 25 March 2007 @ 4pm

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This is the weblog of Rafe Colburn. I'm a software developer and computer book author, but this blog is really about whatever catches my interest on a day to day basis. I've been blogging since December, 1998.

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