I will admit that when John Gruber’s Markdown plugin came out I was a little skeptical of it. But I downloaded it anyway and installed it, and as I began to use it I began to think that it might have been more my nerdy ego keeping me coding my entries in raw html; html coding is really a pain when you are just trying to write.
Writing simple html anchors is fairly tedious, you have to think ahead and find the url of the link before you decide what you want the text of the link to be, and writing html lists is just a pain.
Add in the time it takes to go back over everything and check your syntax and hope that you won’t bring down your otherwise valid application/xhtml+xml, and Markdown begins to look like a nice guy.
I had always flirted with routing all my post drafts through the W3C HTML Validator, but it would have been real complicated to do and I didn’t want to sit down and take the time ever. I also wanted to use MTValidate to require all my comments to be valid html, but it also was just a pain to setup.
But with the Markdown with SmartyPants option set as the new default for both posting and commenting here on station11, I ensure valid html and escaped entries withough having to do anything! And it all comes so naturally. Writing in plaintext is something that I know how to do, and markdown for the most part uses simple routines that I have always used to convey meaning in text to convert it into html.
And now plus, as you might have noticed in my most recent ticker link, markdown works in any cocoa app textbox!
I love it, yes I do.