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?
Good question. I used <textarea> since I have the unusual circumstance of having to write down "</xmp>" in my Markdown, which would close the opening <xmp> if I had one :)
Most users won't have to do this.
Google does index <xmp>, see e.g. the search result for "devo site:www.the-pope.com". The word "devo" is inside <xmp>.
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?
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:
I would speculate (after no more than a cursory glance) that using the xmp tag is the Google-indexable method of writing your page? Google should see it as plain text on a web page.
Textarea support could be to provide interactive/editable pages?
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.
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) :)
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 :)
Funny how there are so many overlapping ideas, I just started work on an OSS MarkDown-based site generator using Bootswatch themes as well. Nice work on Strapdown.
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.
