the basics page: show, don't tell?

[John Gruber]

Aaron Swartz <me at aaronsw.com> wrote on 03/17/04 at 11:12p:

> http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics
> 
> Right now output is done in encoded HTML. Have you considered showing 
> leaving the HTML raw, so that browser users see what the result 
> actually looks like. I think this would help break up the monotony of 
> the page, it'd make the result easier to see/understand, and it would 
> make the Basics page useful to people who don't know HTML (perhaps a 
> large potential audience for Markdown).

I didn't really consider it for the Basics page, but it's exactly
the reason why the Dingus shows both the raw and rendered HTML.


> The downside is that it'd make things like title's a little harder to 
> understand and the styling of your page might confuse some.

I'm not sure it would work in the context of the Basics page, for
this reason. I think I'd need to wrap each of the rendered output
examples in a div so that I could style them differently than the
actual rendered content of the page itself. But then there's the
potential confusion as to where the `<div>` tags came from.

It works for the Dingus because there's no confusion where it came
from.

-J.G.