Markdown

I have been leaning toward using Textile in the new version of the site and in general writing. As you can read in the Markup article, the initial lean was inspired by Textile’s method of indicating emphasis: _emphasis_ and *strong emphasis* versus Markdown’s *emphasis* and **strong emphasis**. The former seemed more natural at the time.

While casting about for Textile tools, it seems as if — at least on the Python side of things — development hasn’t been particularly rampant lately. That combined with Merlin’s recent endorsing of Markdown prompted me to revisit John Gruber’s markup effort.

I first read up on some of John’s methodology and liked his email “foundation”:

In fact, I love writing email. Email is my favorite writing medium. I’ve sent over 16,000 emails in the last five years. The conventions of plain text email allow me to express myself clearly and precisely, without ever getting in my way.

Then I re-read this post of his, answering a query about the underscore/asterisk issue: asterisks as bold or italic?. This bit struck a chord with me:

…if you stop thinking about “italics” and “bold”, and think instead of “emphasis” and “strong emphasis”, I think it”s very fair to say that this and this both imply normal emphasis.

Fair enough. The rest of the syntax seems good, as well (though I do think I prefer Textile’s header handling).

There’s a bundled Perl-based conversion engine that I could use on the CLI, something I’ve not been able to track down for Textile. And there’s the 3rd-party PHP Markdown.

Markdown is also supported in various blogging platforms, not to mention Drupal, VoodooPad, TextMate, etc.