Things seem to go in cycles. Writing a document using old-fashioned tools like TROFF or LaTeX is like knowing a secret code. Visual editors quickly took over, although even WordStar had some “dot commands” that you put in as text. Then HTML showed up and we were back to coding formatting as text strings.

Fast forward to the present, and HTML’s ubiquity makes that seem normal. Sure, there are visual editors, but it seems perfectly normal now to write <b> for bold text. However, as HTML grows to handle more tasks it also gets more complex. That’s led to the creation of things like Markdown which is just for simple text formatting. Continue reading “Documentation By Markup” →