How I run this site - part 3 of 7 - Markdown
7 December 2020
When I started thinking about how I would run this website, my main
thought was that this should be as simple as possible and in a format
that was permanent and simple, as well as platform and application
independent. And should be readable.
A Microsoft Word document, for example, is readable and simple, but it
is bound to Microsoft Word and is not readable by other incompatible
applications.
An ordinary text file would thus be permanent and simple. And
absolutely platform and application independent. A text file will for
all (imaginable) future be readable by a number of applications on all
thinkable platforms.
The problem with a text file is in the web context that it does not
contain any formatting.
On the other hand, I might have written my text directly in a document
in HTML format. But it will then be difficult to read, for example, in
a text editor. An HTML file contains lots of meta tags that make the
document less readable.
I wanted a combination of these. A text document where I can write in
normal language without thinking about tags, which is very readable
and which is permanent. But that can be easily transferred to HTML for
web.
The solution is called Markdown.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain-text-formatting
syntax, created in 2004 by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. Markdown is
often used for formatting readme files, for writing messages in online
discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text
editor.
Learn more about
Markdown at Wikipedia.
Instead of writing:
<H1> This is a headline </H1>You simply write:
This is a headline
==================This means that the regular text file contains formatted text without the use of HTML tags, which makes it very readable and transferable.
Markdown is maintained and explained with good documentation on the website of John Gruber: Daring Fireball - Markdown.
In part 4 of this series I will explain how I can easily get this text file transformed into an HTML document for web publication.