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This. I use Markdown syntax when writing blog posts since Posterous formats Markdown just fine and it lets me view my writing (mostly) unstyled in vim, which I

This. I use Markdown syntax when writing blog posts since Posterous formats Markdown just fine and it lets me view my writing (mostly) unstyled in vim, which I personally find much more comfortable than some web-based editor.

bergie 15y ago
I do the same, though I guess this is more the fault of current web-based editors than of HTML itself. I'm trying to explore some ideas of simplicity in browser-based HTML editing with Hallo (http://bergie.github.com/hallo/ http://bergie.github.com/hallo/), but remains to be seen how well that works out. In the meanwhile there is always Markdown. And Vim.
- 6ren 15y ago
  It's striking to me that markdown has become so popular, when wysiwyg HTML editors have been around for a long time, and are supposed to be easier to use (I would expect them to be). Perhaps it's partly that using asterisks for emphasis makes more intuitive sense than ^I or clicking a button etc; and partly that mostly people don't use it - let alone the more complex markdown features.
  - bergie 15y ago
    I think it would make a lot of sense for WYSIWYG editors to support Markdown-like microsyntax for simple formatting: https://github.com/bergie/hallo/issues/11 https://github.com/bergie/hallo/issues/11 This way you start writing _something, and it becomes something
  - michaelschade 15y ago
    It's not that the WYSIWYG editors aren't easy to use in most senses–they're not difficult at all. However, many people that use Markdown are probably geeky enough to not need some WYSIWYG editor in the first place. For me, I'm in the terminal and MacVim for a good portion of my day hacking around; so, while I enjoy portions of the Google Docs(or whatever editor) interface, if I stop my usual coding activities to write a blog post, I'd like to stay in my natural environment of vim and terminal. This is particularly true if my blog post contains code–it feels much more natural for me to paste code samples between vim windows than it does to copy code from vim and paste it into some external editor. (So, basically, it's not just the syntax, it's also the environment in which I get to write that syntax.)
  - macrael 15y ago
    The biggest advantage for Markdown is that it is in plain text. It looks good in plain text. This makes it incredibly portable, lets me write it in whatever text editor I have at hand (even ssh'd into another machine (though I don't do that very often, everything I write is just in dropbox)). I prefer having my writing sitting on my machine in straight forward plain text formats rather than in HTML. It is so much easier to deal with this way, and it is a one step process to convert it to HTML when I want to post it online. Plus, if I want to convert it to some other format, it would be trivial to do so.

bergie 15y ago

I do the same, though I guess this is more the fault of current web-based editors than of HTML itself. I'm trying to explore some ideas of simplicity in browser-based HTML editing with Hallo (http://bergie.github.com/hallo/ http://bergie.github.com/hallo/), but remains to be seen how well that works out. In the meanwhile there is always Markdown. And Vim.

6ren 15y ago
It's striking to me that markdown has become so popular, when wysiwyg HTML editors have been around for a long time, and are supposed to be easier to use (I would expect them to be). Perhaps it's partly that using asterisks for emphasis makes more intuitive sense than ^I or clicking a button etc; and partly that mostly people don't use it - let alone the more complex markdown features.
- bergie 15y ago
  I think it would make a lot of sense for WYSIWYG editors to support Markdown-like microsyntax for simple formatting: https://github.com/bergie/hallo/issues/11 https://github.com/bergie/hallo/issues/11 This way you start writing _something, and it becomes something
- michaelschade 15y ago
  It's not that the WYSIWYG editors aren't easy to use in most senses–they're not difficult at all. However, many people that use Markdown are probably geeky enough to not need some WYSIWYG editor in the first place. For me, I'm in the terminal and MacVim for a good portion of my day hacking around; so, while I enjoy portions of the Google Docs(or whatever editor) interface, if I stop my usual coding activities to write a blog post, I'd like to stay in my natural environment of vim and terminal. This is particularly true if my blog post contains code–it feels much more natural for me to paste code samples between vim windows than it does to copy code from vim and paste it into some external editor. (So, basically, it's not just the syntax, it's also the environment in which I get to write that syntax.)
- macrael 15y ago
  The biggest advantage for Markdown is that it is in plain text. It looks good in plain text. This makes it incredibly portable, lets me write it in whatever text editor I have at hand (even ssh'd into another machine (though I don't do that very often, everything I write is just in dropbox)). I prefer having my writing sitting on my machine in straight forward plain text formats rather than in HTML. It is so much easier to deal with this way, and it is a one step process to convert it to HTML when I want to post it online. Plus, if I want to convert it to some other format, it would be trivial to do so.