Sam Minnée

A random collection of stuff that I want online.

Why Markdown?

14 January 2010 11:22am. permalink

Like many geeks, I have a weakness for shiny new technologies. At the moment, two that I am particularly enamoured with are Git and Markdown. A trap I can fall into with new toys such as this is applying them everywhere, regardless of whether or not they are actually any better than the incumbent tool. Although this can be fun, it's not especially useful.

A better approach is to understand exactly what the biggest benefits of the new tool are. So: why Markdown?

• Like HTML, it's a document markup language that abstracts semantics from presentation. Although it doesn't have the full expressive capability of HTML, it's good enough for my needs, and it's a hell of a lot easier to read in its raw format. This is important, because you need to be able to dig into the raw source form without the use of fancy tools.

I've started by applying Markdown to my blog and to personal documents that I keep stuff jotted down in. This is fairly run of the mill; blogging was what Markdown was designed for.

So, what are some of the stranger ideas that we can apply it do.

To Do List

You can store a to-do list in markdown like this

To do
=====

 * Put out the garbage
 * Do the laundry
 * (Started) Do the laundry

Done
----

 * Cleaned the toilet

The key in using Markdown is to ensure that the source format can be enjoyably edited in a plaintext editor. If you have to actually use the tool in order to make an enjoyable editing experience, then you may was well store the data in XML.

That's not to say the tool is entirely useless - there are always going to be optimisations you can make to the editing experience with a customised tool. Direct editing of the file won't be the only mode of interaction. Rather,

The readability of the data source in its raw form is perhaps an even more important fact. Raw text integrates better with a whole host of tools, not least of which is version control. If the raw format of a document is readable, then so are diffs, blamelists, etc.