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The premise here that "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks" should be questioned. Who says that the content of the writin

The premise here that "Markdown lets you think about what you’re writing instead of how it looks" should be questioned. Who says that the content of the writing is necessarily so much more important than how it looks? There's a reason that books are meant to look nice - we enjoy the look and feel of them. Likewise, I enjoy reading things on certain blogs - e.g., The Verge, Medium, Grantland - because they look really great and it's a great reading experience. I'm almost tempted to think that it's the opposite - superpowerful WYSIWYG is the future of writing. End users will get to create amazing multimedia experiences. For better or worse, writing will be freed from being just about words.

zenojevski 13y ago
One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateurish, or downright tiring to read: differences in spacing, font, color, all these make for an awful end result which is also annoying to maintain[1]. All in all this is akin to provisioning instead of scripting: you declare _what you want_ (a pull-out quote) instead of _how to do it_, letting the compiler take care of the rest. The downside of markdown is that it is a two phase compose/preview system, which has been resolved with dual panes up to now. But it is not a showstopper, especially considering that professional copywriters already compose stories separate from presentation[2]. [1]: Yes, I know that Word has _styles_. Which are kind of similar in intent to markdown's #, >, *, even though they are not always semantically significant, and they also include presentation. [2]: InDesign's story editor: http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-editor.png http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-...

zenojevski 13y ago

One of the staples of aesthetic beauty in typography is coherency. Markdown allows to reach that easily. This is also why so many Word products look so amateurish, or downright tiring to read: differences in spacing, font, color, all these make for an awful end result which is also annoying to maintain[1]. All in all this is akin to provisioning instead of scripting: you declare _what you want_ (a pull-out quote) instead of _how to do it_, letting the compiler take care of the rest. The downside of markdown is that it is a two phase compose/preview system, which has been resolved with dual panes up to now. But it is not a showstopper, especially considering that professional copywriters already compose stories separate from presentation[2]. [1]: Yes, I know that Word has _styles_. Which are kind of similar in intent to markdown's #, >, *, even though they are not always semantically significant, and they also include presentation. [2]: InDesign's story editor: http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-editor.png http://indesignsecrets.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/story-...