I was reading Manu’s post about ‘old tech’ and suddenly thought, markdown is really, really good.
What is it?
Markdown is a markup (get it?) language which aims to make formatting text as easy as possible, while still being easy to read. Markdown can be processed into HTML, which is what the web is made of. It was created by John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz, and released over 20 years ago. It is commonly found in blogging software, content management systems, software documentation, and many other places.
This post that you’re reading right now is written in markdown.
Most alternatives to markdown are what I call ‘rich text’, which vary quite a bit in how they work, they are often more complex and proprietary.
Here’s why I think that markdown is really, really good.
You write it
Markdown is for writing, and it’s designed to be written. You don’t need to memorise an interface to use markdown, you need to remember a syntax instead, and you can use that same syntax everywhere that you write markdown.
In markdown to write add a link to a webpage you type a ‘[‘ followed by the link text, if you’re really lucky whatever you’re typing into is smart enough to close that square bracket for you, then you type a ‘(‘ followed by the URL. Notice you never had to stop typing to add this link, this process is exactly the same wherever you are writing markdown, there is no keyboard shortcuts or special interface to remember.
In ‘rich text’ world you would need to stop typing and do a few things. You might need to type your link text then highlight it, then find then whichever button that you need to convert it to a link, then you may need to use whichever interface this particular app uses to add the link for you, they vary wildly.
It’s HTML
Markdown makes HTML, perfectly standard HTML that any web browser can understand, every single thing that you write with markdown becomes HTML, just like the HTML that you are reading right now.
Sadly in the ‘rich text’ world you can never really be sure what you’re going to get. Sometimes your web browser will receive a very sad knotty mess of spaghetti code, that creates all sort of problems, and bugs.
You can take it with you
Markdown files are plain text files, you don’t need a special app to open or edit them. Markdown by itself has no interface but they are plenty of great apps that can wrap it in one if you like. Markdown files are also tiny, they don’t come bundled with a bunch of proprietary metadata that a specific app needs to understand the file. This makes markdown very portable.
You can also copy and paste markdown between different markdown friendly places and nothing bad will happen. I find it very annoying that when I copy text from one ‘rich text’ editor to say, Google Docs nothing is formatted right, so I have to do it all again.
You can hack it
There are many, many plugins, add-on’s and other ways to add features to markdown. There are plugins out there that will automatically generate a table of contents based on the headings that you write, and plugins that allow you to write and generate footnotes, there’s a world of possibilities.
If you want something really specific you can write your own plugin, and something completely custom to markdown if you want.
Markdown may be old but I think it’s the best way to write. Markdown is for writing, it makes great HTML, it’s portable, and it’s customisable.