Great work!

[John Gabriele]

On Dec 8, 2007 7:31 AM, Jonathan Coxhead <jonathan at doves.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> I've just spent a happy couple of days writing a text file for formatting with

> Markdown. The results are phenomenal! It's easy to write, and attractive to

> read.

>

> {snip}

>

> This leaves us with # $ % & * + < = > @ [ \ ] ^ _ ` {

> | } ~ to have fun with:

>

> {snip}

>

> I hope this message is received in the spirit it's intended. If there are

> serious Markdown standardisation efforts underway, I'm not intending to

> undermine them. The above was done for my own use and amusement, and could never

> have happened without John Gruber's fine creation: a work of genius!


Hi Jonathan,

The changes you posted about seem quite reminiscent of Textile.
Textile supports a lot of markup syntax.

Markdown is very minimal, and allows mixed-in html. I'm not sure if
Textile allows you to put html in your doc.

I tried Textile a while back. I found that, right when I first found
it, I liked it a lot. Then after using it for a while for technical
docs, with all that syntax, the markup would sometimes interfere with
content I was trying to write (probably due to my laziness, or
forgetting to backslash escape special characters). Also, it wasn't as
easy to read as Markdown.

It seems like there's a continuum in markup formats: on one end you've
got Textile, which uses lots of funny symbols or short handy strings
to mean all sorts of things. At the other end, you've got formats like
Texinfo which use @commands{@emph{for} @strong{everything}}.
Personally -- *for general documentation* -- I think the best balance
is somewhere in the middle, and have been leaning toward Perl 6 Pod
lately...

But, for me, Markdown has been good for README's, and for converting
small bits of text to html. I just wish it came off-the-shelf with
support for definition lists and tables. Those are, IMO, the two
glaring deficiencies of MD.

---John