I’ve discovered an amazingly simple way to handle formatting in a blog post. It is called Markdown. Specifically, I am using Text Control with PHP Markdown. It was a breeze to install both plugins seperately, but unfortunately the default copy of PHP Markdown in Text Control itself (20b1) was broken. My solution was to replace the markdown.php file in the Text Control directory with the one from PHP MarkDown 1.0.1k. It works like a dream. Another version of Text Control is also available, although not by the original author. I’m not sure what it does differently, but if I encounter problems with my current setup I will try that one.
The advantage Text Control offers is that you can decide which posts to use Markdown on, and which to use other formatting methods with. It also provides an easy way to switch on Smarty Pants support if desired. Smarty Pants allows you to use “curly” quotation marks, among other things. I’m pretty comfortable using 7-bit ASCII punctuation at the moment, so I haven’t started using it. But it’s still nice to have the option available, in case I change my mind and suddenly want advanced formatting options.
Markdown itself is very simple. Links are created with [name](address), emphasis is either *italics* or **bold**. Backticks can be used to describe code without formatting, and numbered lists can be created using numbers. The idea behind it is to make the code readable as possible in plain text. HTML fails miserably at this. <em>It's hard to make sense</em> of <strong>text</strong> <a href=http://www.w3c.org>full of tags</a>. HTML is good for machines, but not so much for people. Markdown’s syntax is mainly derived from conventions naturally developed by people using plain-text email protocols. Thus it is very intuitive to use and easy to produce on a keyboard. It also looks great on your web browser once converted to HTML.
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