

Show HN: Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents - arturadib
http://strapdownjs.com

======
fijter
I like the use of markdown for this kind of purpose but i'd rather just
compile from markdown to the generated HTML and put that online for a better
user experience (no flash of unstyled markdown content) and possibly better
Google indexing.

~~~
arturadib
That's fair. I personally wrote Strapdown since I couldn't find a really
simple Markdown framework that generated beautiful docs and Just Worked(TM) :)

~~~
fijter
Oh yeah, it generates great output for sure, I might just write a simple
wrapper (in PhantomJS or whatever) to automate the compilation step using a
markdown document and strapdown, or if I'm lazy I'll just save the generated
code from the Chrome inspector :)

------
desireco42
I really love this approach. It simplifies a lot of back and forth that I have
to do on a server, even with all the plugins to make things easier, front end
is the right place to do this. So, thank you.

------
marban
Did someone come across any stats about markdown adoption/acceptance among
regular users over richtext editors?

------
mattmanser
I do like it, one question though, anyone can speculate as to why he says use
an xmp tag, but then himself uses a textarea on the page? And will google
index it?

~~~
taylorfausak
I hadn't heard of the <xmp> tag before now. His reasoning ("so that users
don't have to escape special HTML characters") seems to be correct, except
that it's a deprecated tag (<http://stackoverflow.com/q/4545>). Perhaps he
used a <textarea> on this page so he could have the literal "</xmp>" in it?

~~~
arturadib
That's correct. Although the tag is deprecated, I've tried it with all modern
browsers (IE and mobile Safari included), and it seems to work just fine.

I'd think it would take a long time to phase this tag out as it was apparently
popular among HTML spec writers, which means there's probably a ton of them
still in the wild:

<https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12235>

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Couldn't you just escape it, i.e.

    
    
        <\/xmp>
    

inside the text?

~~~
taylorfausak
There's no provision for escaping things inside an <xmp> tag. From the HTML
2.0 spec: "no markup except the end-tag […] is recognized"
[http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-
spec_5.html#SEC5.5.2...](http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-
spec_5.html#SEC5.5.2.1)

