Wow. After installing Markdown yesterday, I figured I'd just check in and see what ecto actually did with my Markdown formatted text during preview. I didn't try this yesterday because the server move made reaching my site a little bit more dicey, and I didn't want to mess with hostnames in ecto.
So, I launched ecto. Like often, there was a new point release - but this one supported Markdown. Wow. That was quick.
Anyway, the site move is finished. Everyone should be seeing the new site. The move was further complicated by my old hosting site going down for a few hours during the time when the old DNS entries were expiring from people's caches everywhere. Boy, glad I moved!
Meanwhile, kwc and I had a discussion about how useful these pre-HTML editing environments are. I contend that, for blogging purposes, this is a way better environment. Read the position piece for more on why this is good.
I personally like the resumption of readability. I get reasonable markup capability, but copy-and-pastable human-readable text for e-mailing, and I can still read the text while I go, without having to re-parse it in my own brain. This is like some of the earlier HTML editors... all of which I eventually gave up on, 'cause their HTML syntax was too poor. ecto already has some kludges for this kind of thing which are nice, like user-enterable macro-expansions of HTML-style tags, but it's only an improvement for typing speed, not readability. What do I lose by using Markdown? Well, there are some corner cases that are harder to enter, mostly dealing with when you use * or [ characters. But, it handles the average case quite quite well. In the meantime, if I decide to dump Markdown, it's a synch to emit HTML for everything and get on with life. I guess it would be slightly better if, instead of storing just the pre-HTML in the Movabletype database, Markdown could take a hint from SparrowWeb and the like, and store the actual HTML content in the output, and just hide the original content in <!-- HTML comments --> stored along with the resulting HTML. Then, at "junk it and move on" day, you wouldn't have to even bother doing anything with it. Oh well.
To give you some idea how easy it is to compose with Markdown, here's the content of this post as entered:
Wow. After installing [Markdown][] yesterday, I figured I'd just check in and see what [ecto][]
actually *did* with my [Markdown][] formatted text during preview. I didn't try this yesterday
because the server move made reaching my site a little bit more dicey, and I didn't want to mess
with hostnames in [ecto][].
So, I launched ecto. Like often, there was a new point release - but [this one][ectorelease]
supported [Markdown][]. Wow. That was quick.
Anyway, the site move is finished. Everyone should be seeing the new site. The move was further
complicated by my [old hosting site][hc] going down for a few hours during the time when the old
DNS entries were expiring from people's caches everywhere. Boy, glad I moved!
Meanwhile, [kwc][] and I had a discussion about how useful these pre-HTML editing environments
are. I contend that, for blogging purposes, this is a way better environment. Read the [position
piece][mdpp] for more on why this is good.
I personally like the resumption of readability. I get reasonable markup capability, but copy-and
-pastable human-readable text for e-mailing, and I can still read the text while I go, without having
to re-parse it in my own brain. This is like some of the earlier HTML editors... all of which I
eventually gave up on, 'cause their HTML syntax was too poor. [ecto][] already has some kludges
for this kind of thing which are nice, like user-enterable macro-expansions of HTML-style tags, but
it's only an improvement for typing speed, not readability. What do I lose by using Markdown?
Well, there are some corner cases that are harder to enter, mostly dealing with when you use * or [
characters. But, it handles the average case quite quite well. In the meantime, if I decide to dump
Markdown, it's a synch to emit HTML for everything and get on with life. I guess it would be
*slightly* better if, instead of storing just the pre-HTML in the Movabletype database, Markdown
could take a hint from [SparrowWeb][] and the like, and store the actual HTML content in the
output, and just hide the original content in `` stored along with the resulting
HTML. Then, at "junk it and move on" day, you wouldn't have to even bother doing anything with
it. Oh well.
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[ecto]: http://kung-foo.tv/ecto/
[ectorelease]:http://www.kung-foo.tv/blog/archives/000823.php#000823
[hc]: http://www.hostcolor.com/
[mdpp]: http://daringfireball.net/2004/03/dive_into_markdown
[SparrowWeb]: http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/sparrow/
[kwc]: http://www.kwc.org/blog
To give you some idea how easy it is to compose with [Markdown][], here's the content of this post
as entered:
(Yes, I did do that with Markdown itself, just copied the text, and stuck it between a set of <blockquote><pre> tags. Auto-escaping and auto-HTML make this whole process incredibly simple)
Update: kwc points out that I boofed the Markdown syntax. Actually, several times, but the first ones really were typos. In this case, though, I forgot to escape the HTML <-- tag. Worse, I used the wrong one... it should've been <!--. Which apparently caused the closing comment tag --> to not get escaped, as any > needs to be to preserve XML tidiness. Oh well. Thanks kwc! Bug report in progress...
