Mark Up and Mark Down

Simon Willison has written a nice blog entry on using markup systems to simplify creating text, links, and images in web pages. Now, I'm pretty savvy about html at this point, but my blog has some fussiness about how it outputs pages -- especially when I use <blockquote> -- that I'm always forgetting about.

Inspired by Simon's article, I decided to give John Gruber's MarkDown a try. It comes as a Movable Type plugin and works immediately. In fact, this entry is written using the MarkDown Syntax. Quite cool. And it seems to validate just fine too.

BTW, lest you think I didn't actually read Simon's blog past the first paragraph, its main thrust deals with writing bookmarklets -- javascript code snippets that adds on-the-fly functionality to browsers. My April 8 blog entry on "The Synergism of Library Innovations" mentions a theoretical use of bookmarklets in a library setting.

Posted by Tom on April 13, 2004