Is HTML a Humane Markup Language? One of the things we're thinking about while building stackoverflow.com is how to let users style the questions and answers they're entering on the site. Nothing's decided at this point, but we definitely won't be giving users one of those friendly-but-irritating HTML GUI browser layout controls. I have one iron-clad design guide: this is a site for programmers, so they should be comfortable with basic markup. None of that nancy-boy GUI toolbar handholding nonsense for us, thankyouverymuch. If you can sling code, a little bit of presentation markup is child's play. We will support some sort of markup language to style the questions and answers.
But what markup language? I mentioned in podcast #4 that we consider Wikipedia a defining influence. It's an effective markup language, but I think you'll agree that it's more intimidating than humane. Let's consider a simpler example. Here's what that looks like expressed in a variety of lightweight markup languages. Lightweight Markup Languages. Lightweight markup languages are markup languages designed with an honest attempt to make them simple enough for non-programmers to read and write in them. They were originally used on text-only displays on which you could not display bold or italicized text. Another application of lightweight markup languages is where people might need to read the document source as well as present a well-formatted rendered output.
Until a few years ago, to publish anything on the internet, you had three options: 1. 2. 3. In the last few years, the first two options have not changed. There are several lightweight markup languages available on the internet. Textile Textile was developed by Dean Allen and he called it the "the humane web text generator". You can download the source code for PHP from here. Markdown The creators of Markdown, John Gruber and Aaron Swartz felt the need to develop a language with maximum readability of both the source code as well as the rendered output. And the others Headings. Tools: Textile. Daring Fireball. README.markdown at master from viatropos/seesaw - GitHub. SeeSaw.