As a tech writer, I have spent many years searching for the lost chord: a writing tool suited for both print and web publishing, with an easy review process, content management features that allow sophisticated structuring and reuse, good integration with source control, and so on. Reddit, GitHub, StackExchange, Wordpress, and others created derivative versions of Markdown that provided capabilities not included in the original specification. Over the first few years, while most programming languages were developing parsers and libraries for Markdown, many sites were developing their own variations with additional features. Of course, these limitations didn’t sit well with everyone. If you need more than what Markdown provides, you can add some HTML, but the main goal is a simple, uncluttered writing environment. The focus is on the writer first, and capability is added only where it helps with what the writer is trying to do. ![]() What makes Markdown interesting is that it gets excessive features out of the way of the mechanics of writing. Other markup languages can do everything Markdown can do - and more. In a way, it is the limitations of Markdown that make it revolutionary. The idea was to make it very easy to read, write, and edit prose with some formatting, and that the result should be usable as-is. In fact, one inspiration for Markdown syntax was the kind of formatting that people use in plain-text email. Accordingly, its syntax is small: it addresses the subset of HTML tags that specify things which could be conveyed in plain text. Markdown was not intended to replace HTML, but to augment it - it is meant as a writing tool, whereas HTML is a publishing format. Its main purpose was to make it easier to create web pages without all those HTML tags getting in the way of the writing process. John Gruber, a writer and UI designer, invented Markdown in 2004: a lightweight markup language plus a PERL script for converting Markdown to valid, well-formed XHTML or HTML. Update: If you want more information, I actually wrote a book that talks about this (and other Markdown stuff): Markdown Dreams: How to do things with Markdown and Git Whence Markdown But what is it, and why should you (not) use it? And one that keeps coming up, as a lightweight writing format, a lingua franca among other file types, and a lure to get engineers to document their code better, is Markdown. From DITA to Frame, LaTeX to SGML, Confluence to MediaWiki, you can find a framework for every purpose. If you are a writer, especially a tech writer, there’s a roiling sea of tools and formats to consider. ![]() Why You Should and Should Not Use Markdown
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |