
Write (More) Effortlessly With Markdown - shawndumas
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/markdown/
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programminggeek
I think the coolest and maybe most misunderstood part of Markdown is that it
is designed to make README files into reasonable HTML. In the process of
designing something that made for human readable text files that can be easily
translated into HTML it became one of the biggest text input standards on the
internet.

Like JSON, on its own, Markdown is a nice little tool, but what people have
picked up and done with Markdown is really inspiring.

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slashdotaccount
This is wrong. Gruber designed Markdown for writing blog entries, so Wordpress
is using it for the original purpose. README files are just one of these
additional purposes you allude to in your last sentence.

Also, Markdown is not a standard (yet), and the ecosystem suffers greatly for
it.

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bradleyland
If we're chasing the canonical rabbit, Markdown wasn't designed for any
specific purpose. It was designed upon a core principle: that Markdown's
syntax should be as readable as possible. That is, Markdown should be readable
_before_ it has been converted to any specific machine-readable format.

Straight from the author:

> The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as
> readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should
> be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked
> up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been
> influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters, the single biggest
> source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text
> email.

[http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)

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JohnTHaller
... or you could just use the WYSIWYG editor that's built into WordPress and
is far more effortless to work with :)

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freshyill
Clicking a bunch of buttons definitely seems easier than just writing some
simple Markdown.

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JohnTHaller
You can use hotkeys in the WYSIWYG editor.

In this text, we can do CTRL-B bold CTRL-B and CTRL-I italic CTRL-I words.

as opposed to

In this text, we can do SHIFT-8 SHIFT-8 bold SHIFT-8 SHIFT-8 and SHIFT-8
italic SHIFT-8 words.

And, happily, there's a separate hotkey for bold and italic that makes sense
(I and B) as opposed to having to remember that one asterisk is bold and two
asterisks is italic. No, wait, it's the other way around.

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Vektorweg
Uh. I write every document in Pandoc Markdown.

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mrpoptart
Why isn't everyone adopting Jade instead?

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mkr-hn
What is it?

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salehenrahman
It's a templating language [1], but it seems a lot of developers (myself
included) use it to DOM description language, just like HTML or XML. Better
yet, people replace those languages with Jade!

[1] [https://github.com/visionmedia/jade](https://github.com/visionmedia/jade)

