On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 3:09 AM, justin <[email protected]> wrote:
> ᐧ
>
> On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 1:30 AM, S. Dale Morrey <[email protected]>wrote:
>
>> Markdown is the new hotness in formatting. Instead of open and close
>> tags like SGML/HTML/XML your markup is done with a single tag and
>> indenting takes care of the rest.
>
>
> You're thinking of [Haml][1], which is not awesome.
>
> [Markdown][2], on the other hand, _is_ awesome. Because it's just a
> canonicalization of text formats **we already all use** when we're writing
> in plain text. Like this email, in fact.
>
> The snip above from Dale's email is a blockquote.
>
> **This text is bold**, _this is italic_.
>
> These things that look like paragraphs: are.
>
> 1. I linked the "Markdown" and "Haml" text above.
> 2. This is an ordered list.
> * You can make unordered lists, too.
> * And nested lists, just by indenting things.
>
> You should check it out. You probably already know most of the syntax :)
>
>
> [1]: http://haml.info
> [2]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
There are also some great tools that convert Markdown (and sometimes
other "markup-lite" input formats) into various output formats, i.e.
Docbook, LaTeX, Word and OpenOffice XML formats, other "markup-lite"
formats, etc. My tool of choice in that space is Pandoc, but
Multimarkdown is another popular one.
I agree that HAML and other similar HTML-generating languages are a
bit lame. I think the obsession of the Ruby/Node web dev community
over extreme minimalism in syntax is misplaced; sometimes syntax is
very helpful! I tried a HAML-like syntax in a small hobby project I
worked on for a while and it seemed to cause more problems for me than
whatever tiny amount of character-typing it saved.
On the other hand, I've used Pandoc at work to do collaborative and
version-controlled technical documentation. It's infinitely nicer
than using Word's change tracking features, at least if you're already
familiar with the world of text editors, version control tools, and
build processes. And a couple of coworkers involved in some IEEE
standards are using a reStructured Text-based toolchain, which they've
come to really prefer over the standard Word-based workflow that most
IEEE documents go through before their final conversion into a desktop
publishing tool. For technical documents, rST is probably a better
format, as it's designed to be extensible to add various metadata in a
fairly lightweight way, which is nice when your published format has
sidebars of different classifications, callouts in tables/figures,
etc. The core of Markdown is cleaner for things like emails, blog
posts, README files, etc. so it's been very popular and will continue
to be. Unfortunately there's not any interest on the part of John
Gruber (at least that I'm aware of) of blessing anyone's extensions or
variants of Markdown, so it's a very loose format where
implementations are rarely entirely compatible and to some extent
you'll probably get locked into the particular dialect you start out
with unless you start with a pretty vanilla one.
--Levi
Pandoc: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/
MultiMarkdown: http://fletcherpenney.net/multimarkdown/
reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
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