== Why simple markup languages make sense

I'm a big fan of simple markup languages for writing web pages (or in
fact any sort of document; it just happens that web sites are pretty
much everything I write these days). Recently I figured out a good
expression of why:

> Simple markup languages are the same idea as high level programming
> languages: less make-work and more of what actually matters.

(And as an added bonus, less interruption of my writing to sprinkle
HTML all over.)

Languages like C and Java have a bunch of necessary repetitive tedium
that you wind up doing over and over again to pacify the language, to
the extent that automating many of them is a major IDE industry.  One
way that good high level languages are such a pleasure to program in
is that they do away with all of this tedium and let you think about
your program, instead of yet another set of canned getter and setter
methods.

Simple markup languages versus HTML have the sample effect: less <p>s
and <a href="...">s and more of your actual writing. At least for me,
this results in a better focus on just writing, and thus better
writing (and more of it).

As far as I'm concerned, one of the big wins of wikis is how they
streamline writing for the web by using simple markup languages.
(Of course they then often throw away a bunch of this advantage
because [[browsers make bad editors|BrowsersMakeBadEditors]].)

(You can argue that the real answer is 'get a good HTML editor'. One
of the reasons I think that this is not a real answer is that the more
streamlined and unobtrusive the editor is in adding HTML to your plain
writing, the more what you write looks like a simple markup language
to start with.)