Publishable or Published?

[Bowerbird at aol.com]

todd said:
>   is there an expectation that some people will use Markdown-formatted text 
>   without actually translating it to HTML?

as a curious outsider (hi!), i would hope the answer is yes.

for many purposes -- including one of my favorites, e-books --
the browser is (to put it bluntly) an inferior viewer-application.
the interface is wrong, necessary functionalities are missing, etc.

i have actually created my own plain-text formatting system -- 
which i've chosen to call "z.m.l." ("it's two steps past x.m.l."),    :+)
which stands for "zen markup language" or "zero markup language"
-- and am polishing off an e-book-related viewer-program for it.

just because the _file-format_ is readable as plain-text does _not_
mean that the presentation to the user must be an ugly humdrum one.
headers, for instance, once recognized can be rendered big and bold.
and footnotes, to give another example, can be treated appropriately.

if we put our work into making our viewer-programs more intelligent,
they'll be able to take regularized plain-text input and deliver to users
highly-polished document-presentation coupled with powerful features
appropriate to the very nature and structure of that particular document.

and all without requiring people to do the tiresome work of doing markup.
(this also extends our power to content that has not been marked up yet.)

-bowerbird