I have spent a lot of time writing HTML. I stood up my entire personal website in raw HTML and about 20 lines of CSS. Frankly, I don't get the appeal. It doesn

I have spent a lot of time writing HTML. I stood up my entire personal website in raw HTML and about 20 lines of CSS. Frankly, I don't get the appeal. It doesn't make me feel nostalgic. Rather, I just feel the weight of old technologies slowing my writing process, preventing me from getting in a writing flow. It's really, really hard to write sentences when you have to constantly remember to close out tags. Debugging style in an HTML file is one of the most thoroughly uninteresting experiences a developer will have, in my opinion. Markdown has been my favorite markup language for the last several years. A raw Markdown file is very human-readable, compared to the tag detritus scattered about the standard HTML file. In Markdown, there are few formatting rules that must be followed. Additionally, HTML can be embedded in Markdown. So if one really does need custom styling, raw HTML is still available as a fallback. I do not know the extent to which the full HTML spec is supported, but anytime I've been in a bind in Markdown, Of course, Markdown can't be published directly as a static page. One would think that this necessitates the use of complex React plug-ins - but no! A simple bash script and a handy tool called pandoc is all you need: mdToHtml { files=$(find blog -name "*.md") for f in $files; do pandoc -f markdown $f > blog/compiled/$(basename "${f%.*}").html done } What about templates? mdToHtml2() { files=$(find blog -name "*.md") for f in $files; do pandoc -f markdown $f > blog/$(basename "${f%.*}").html head=$(head -n10 templates/blogTemplate.txt) # first n = 10 lines, header up to <body> tail=$(tail -n2 templates/blogTemplate.txt) # last n = 2 lines, </body></html> echo $head | cat - blog/$(basename "${f%.*}").html > temp && mv temp blog/$(basename "${f%.*}").html echo $tail >> blog/$(basename "${f%.*}").html done echo "Markdown files converted to HTML" } That script is excessively verbose, and not optimized for organization. I don't know remember why it writes to a temp file first. But it gets the job done. To summarize: 1) Markdown to HTML conversion is dead simple. 2) Writing in markdown reduces cognitive load by a significant amount, allowing a writer to remain "in flow" much more easily.