The pros and cons of markdown (podcast, part 1‪)‬ The Content Strategy Experts - Scriptorium

In episode 97 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Dr. Carlos Evia of Virginia Tech discuss the pros and cons of markdown.

“I think markdown has a huge user base because most people need to develop content for the web. But there’s a set of people that need to be working in something more structured for a variety of reasons, and those are the ones who use DITA.”

–Dr. Carlos Evia



Related links:



* Does markdown fit into your content strategy?

* Lightweight DITA podcast: part 1 with guests Carlos Evia and Michael Priestley 

* Lightweight DITA podcast: part 2 with guests Carlos Evia and Michael Priestley



Twitter handles:



* @sarahokeefe

* @carlosevia



Transcript:

Sarah O’Keefe:                   Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. My name is Sarah O’Keefe and I’m your host today. In this episode, we discuss the pros and cons of markdown with Dr. Carlos Evia. Dr. Evia is a professor and associate Dean at Virginia Tech and also the Chief Technology Officer in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. Additionally, he’s an expert on DITA XML and has worked toward bringing structured authoring concepts into university curricula. This is part one of a two-part podcast.

SO:                   Carlos, welcome and welcome back to the podcast.

Dr. Carlos Evia:                   Yeah. Thank you for having me again on the podcast.

SO:                   Well, welcome back. And let me start with the basic question and the theme for this podcast, which is what is markdown?

CE:                   Ay yay yay. Well, that’s a tricky thing because if you go back to the 2004 definition from John Gruber, markdown was supposed to be a very simple text to HTML syntax that will kind of look like, I don’t want to use the word structure, but here I am using structure. Like a structured email message or the kind of structured text that we all people used in use nets. For all you youngsters out there, when the web was this new thing and the internet was pretty much text-based and using it was well, you could get all your entertainment, but it was text. To make the text readable, we used some hashtags and underlines and asterisks to emphasize and highlight components. Markdown came to life as part one, precisely that, kind of simple syntax that would make text easy to read, easy to digest, easy to understand. But then the second thing that markdown had was a little tool that will convert that syntax to actual HTML because people were running HTML and they would be like, oh, brackets, who needs that?

CE:                   Then you wouldn’t need to have brackets. You will just write following that syntax. And then there was a little tool that will attach to blog engines, like mobile type back in the early 2000s and that will automatically convert that text to HTML syntax to actual HTML or back in the day, XHTML, that would be presented to web browsers. And that’s it. That’s where markdown was. But I think the evolution of markdown has gone in very interesting ways, not because of the developers or the creators of markdown, but by the use cases that users have given to markdown.

CE:                   And now you can see people who think of markdown as a,