Lightweight Markup

If you've browsed the source files for this blog or for the forthcoming cyborg institute wiki, ciwiki you may notice that my work is mostly stored in "markdown format" which is a lightweight markup language for generating richly formatted text. Markdown isn't the only format around, indeed formats like reStructured text and textile are other very similar tools. Different, but they achieve same purpose. What purpose, you ask anonymous inquirer? They make it easy and painless to write text with links, emphasis (italics), structure (headings), and other features, in an easy to read plain text format.

The truth is that there isn't a really good way for "rich text" (bold, italics, links) to be stored in a format that's both universal enough for computers to read in multiple context (desktop applications, on the web) that's also easy for humans to read and write in a consistent way. Sure there's (x)HTML which is a great format for computers to read, but its hard to write and difficult to read casually. At the same time word-processor formats (.rtf, .doc, .odt, etc) render inconsistently across platforms and don't work as well for use on the web, or for email.

Lightweight markup formats, and particularly markdown, provides a solution to this problem. Rather than creating a format that will render well on web-pages, on paper, and in plain text, these formats provide a limited syntax for most common markup needs and then provide a script to translate this "lightweight" language into other formats. These scripts exist as plugins/modes for most common text editing software, and are implemented in a great many programming languages so that standard lightweight markup can be used in many contexts.

Here's the rundown (note, I'll use markdown as the example but these facts all hold true for other similar products):

• Markdown is human readable, so in some cases (like email, and collaborating with other writers) there's no need to convert a file to XHTML or some other format.

• Markdown is designed to replicate many common editing conventions for plain-text email. So the chances are, that you already know much of the syntax and can understand texts written in markdown quite readily.

• Markdown generates standards compliant XHTML. Even sloppy markdown generates compliant XHTML. XHTML is easy to translate into other formats (including word processor formats), and non-trival to generate perfectly "by hand."

• Markdown interpreters are written in many languages, including Perl, PHP, Python, C, Lisp, Java, C# and so forth, which makes it particularly easy to integrate markdown into whatever environment you're used to working in.

• There are tools, like Maruku (and others) that convert text to other formats (like PDF), for non-web output.

• Text editors (including, vim, emacs, textmate, notepad++, bbedit) have support for syntax highlighting for markdown, so that your editing environment provides a rich interactive environment while still editing simple plain-text files.

• Markdown makes it easy to "live in plain text" without sacrificing features that we, as writers of words, are accustomed to.

The benefits of using markdown, are perhaps most fully realized in the context of using plain text itself, but that's another argument for another time. And as always, if something in this post struck a chord with you, but you don't quite know how to integrate it into your workflow directly, that's something we can work on together.