The Guru College
Markdown, Showdown, and WYSIWYM
What You See Is What You Get.
That was the idea behind the Macintosh. The idea that made PageMaker, all those years ago, so powerful. And it’s what’s missing from the internet. Totally missing. Some applications try to attempt it – but without fail, if you want your website to look the way you want it, you are going to have to get into code. HTML code – and it’s not the easiest to read.
Which is why John Gruber developed Markdown – a simple way to develop content for the web. His site, Daring Fireball is written in it. There are perl modules developed for parsing the language. And it is very elegant. I like the language for it’s simplicity – many times, the need to get into complicated coding just to express a point makes the point not worth expressing. However, for some reason, I resist moving to Markdown.
What You See Is What You Mean
My last reason has been taken away. Here are two slick demos of a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean (WYSIWYM) editor – implemented in Javascript, and live for the world. Give them a whirl. Show them to your friends that aren’t savvy to all this. I think they can use it – and be impressed. I’m going to look at moving to this as fast as I can – this is a pretty amazing way to edit and compose.