Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but today (or yesterday since it’s passed midnight here) I did what I should have done long before and checked out Markdown. According to its creator John Gruber it’s

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).

It is both a way to write plain text documents so that their content is somewhat formatted and a tool to convert this text to xhtml.

The reason I checked this out today (or was it yesterday?) was an article in Macworld called Forget fancy formatting: Why plain text is best. It made some good points about why plain text is almost always better than something written in for example Microsoft Word or Apple Pages.

[Plain text is] timeless. My grandchildren will be able to read a text file I create today, long after anybody can remember what the heck a .dotx file is.

The article then mentioned some tools that was great for plain text writing, among them Byword which according to the article ”has baked-in support for Markdown”. I’d heard about Markdown before, mostly from Merlin Mann in the Back To Work podcast so now I finally made myself find out what it was. (Finding out was as easy as clicking the link in the Macworld article.)

The concept behind Markdown seemed really great, so I decided to try it, and to buy Byword. So far I’ve just made some test documents with the Byword/Markdown combination (as well as writing this blog post) and I must say it seems pretty great. I do a whole lot of writing in my work and most of it is just simple text documents that I’ve used to write in Microsoft Word (yes, I actually do like Word) but I guess the bulk of my writing this upcoming semester will be done full-screen in Byword using Markdown and then exporting the appropriate format. (Apart from xhtml, Byword also exports as .doc, .pdf, .rtf and Latex.)

One more thing

I also found out that although Markdown is written in Perl there is a php version and that version also works as a WordPress plugin. So this very blogpost is written in Byword, marked up (or down?) with Markdown and will then be pasted into a post in my blog, where you will read it.