G'day Nice rant.
I sympathize. Ain't going to happen. In a nut shell, you're proposing that browsers interpret a whole new language. A simpler one than html, but non-the-less a new language. That new language is weak compared to html, in the sense that by itself it can't say, "Float this picture on the right side, resize it to 40% of the column width, put this line on top as the title, put these two paragraphs underneath it as the caption, and put a hairline border around the entire thing." I'll point out that RTF is far richer than markdown, RTF editors are simple for the masses to use, but RTF has not caught on as a browser presentation format. Nor has SVG for graphics, although it would allow you to do things that html can't. Nor has Math ML despite there being no good way to present mathematics in a browser. Markdown allows people to write without worrying about layout. Even this table stuff is a bit over the top, but tables in the day of typewriters were always a pain. (I'm dating myself...) I suspect that the Babylonian scribes cursed tables in their time. I agree that there is a lack of good simple easy ways to make content for an entire site that doesn't get you wrapped up in endless fiddling with the navigation links, and the presentation, AND is easy for a non-tech to use. There are a raft of CMS systems out there. None are trivial to set up for a non-technical person. And for that non-tech to *change* the site style is a very metal container of bass bait. At present Markdown fills a gap, and gives us a middle ground between working with straight html with paired tags for every sneeze, and products like dreamweaver with their wysiwyg view, but producing bloated non-standard html that is hard to integrate into any but a static site. By the way: If you succeed in your project how would like to take on the next biggie: Regularize English spelling? -- Sherwood Botsford Sherwood's Forests Warburg, Alberta T0C 2T0 http://www.sherwoods-forests.com 780-848-2548 _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
