Markdown and Textile: Can’t decide? Try both!
This post about Textile reminded me that I should ramble about alternative syntaxes for marking up content. I’m lazy and could never write validating XHTML by hand so I decided to generate markup from a more simple source, markdown.
Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
Markdown is one of several light weight methods for converting “conventional” email syntax into XHTML. I use it to write everything from my resume to these blog posts thanks to a wordpress plugin.
Compare and contrast the Markdown syntax for a list with the XHTML version:
Markdown
* one
* twoXHTML
<ul>
<li>one</li>
<li>two</li>
</ul>
I’m a fan of using the power of plain text whenever possible. The clean syntax of markdown (heck, even textile) helps me focus on the content over the presentation ultimately letting me blog faster.
I’m a big fan of RDOC’s markup. It’s pretty limited, but for most cases it covers most important things: http://rdoc.sourceforge.net/doc/files/README.html
Skim down to Markup. I actually use it for our office wiki.