Patrick O'Dowd.com - A Bastion of, Et Cetera

On Markdown And How Technology Should Behave

One of the primary functions of computers has been, or at least should have been, to simplify tasks. Whether it be computing large sums of numbers, communicating, organizing data, or writing, the job of the computer should be to simplify and streamline these tasks.

These machines are supposed to make our lives simplier not more complicated. Yet, often we allow them to make our lives even more complex working under the assumption that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing: making our lives simplier.1

It’s easy to feel like we are always benifiting from this new feature or that new technical widget but I would suppose, un-uniquely, that this is far from the case.

So it is refreshing that once in a while one stumbles accross a technological development that does indeed operate as it should: to make our lives simplier.

Markdown Syntax is one of those manifestations of technological development that moves the needle away from complication and towards simplicity.

Markdown is:

a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).2

Here’s what that means: you can write words to publish on the internet without having to worry about code. Markdown becomes part of your writing instead of breaking it up or abstracting it. Pretty powerful stuff.3

1. Facebook and its privacy controls are a perfect example of this. ↩

2. Daring Fireball: Markdown ↩

3. This was all written in markdown using Byword.  ↩