Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels?atomcommentsDWiki2012-11-21T17:46:27ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels.From 87.79.236.202 on /blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevelstag:CSpace:blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels:a31d708bf4088e52df0730f3ff2a1146ffbd7c9bFrom 87.79.236.202<div class="wikitext"><p>Markdown appeals to me foremost for reasons other than its popularity – which reasons I believe its wide adoption specifically derives from, rather than just being an accident. Namely, two aspects:</p>
<ol><li>For the most part, you can just type away without learning anything and much of the time, what comes out will be what you intended. I.e. it’s mainly a codification of very common conventions.<p>
(It has one serious flaw in that respect: it regards intra-word underscores as epmhasis markers. Gruber declared this a bug and an intent to fix it, but never actually did. The big sites that support Markdown all have.)<p>
This helps rare and novice users.<p>
</li>
<li>It is just HTML! You can type HTML and it will come out verbatim. It’s not really a separate markup language (simple or not) so much as a shorthand notation for HTML.<p>
So you don’t <em>have</em> to use Markdown’s syntax <em>instead of</em> HTML. Forget how to write a link in Markdown? Just write it using HTML syntax. Will work either way.<p>
People don’t overlook this as a great feature, but I think they still don’t appreciate it enough. It’s the singular most brilliant decision in the design of the markup, and what puts Markdown in a class of its own and separates it from the would-be competition.</li>
</ol>
<p>And I think these reasons address the concerns of your coworkers, should you choose to use Markdown.</p>
<p>—<a href="http://plasmasturm.org/">Aristotle Pagaltzis</a></p>
</div>2012-11-21T17:46:27ZBy trs80 on /blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevelstag:CSpace:blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels:b12f6fa1e0c8f2ac1a5d7be23de6f84ea089515atrs80<div class="wikitext"><p>There's also the third option - HTML but with a contentEditable wrapper. Definitely the most novice-friendly, it also produces the ugliest HTML if you ever need to edit it.</p>
</div>2012-11-21T13:15:06ZFrom 198.182.56.5 on /blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevelstag:CSpace:blog/web/SimpleMarkupUserLevels:4449432f6894e51ce09f2ea95cf55f5c042d2781From 198.182.56.5<div class="wikitext"><p>I've come to use wikitext as a write-only language, translating it to HTML and then editing the result if I need to change it. What I hate about writing HTML is a) the tedious boilerplate one must hammer out, and - this is really silly, but I'm not really kidding - b) I hate holding down shift to type angle brackets.</p>
<p>- Smarry</p>
</div>2012-11-21T11:08:43Z