Markdown

Web development has never been easier than it is today. While the early days of the open internet brought platforms like Geocities which provided the tutorials and IDEs that developers need to put together basic websites, the ecosystem has grown significantly in the intervening years. Updates to the basic HTML structure and the addition of a whole slew of new tags and markup styles has made it a far more complex and intimidating language. CSS adds a huge range of new utility to any HTML script, but it can also seem like a completely alien language to anyone who grew up on basic HTML. And while there are a number of content management resources that can help you create attractive websites with minimal coding experience, they're often driven by templates and cost prohibitive. Markup offers a free alternative that may not have a huge amount of utility but does provide the means for aspiring developers to write code for the first time. It can automatically convert your plain text documents into HTML and make them ready for the web without having to learn the ins and outs of the language. The philosophy behind John Gruber's markup project is that HTML is both ugly and poorly conducive to the sort of design sensibilities that drive modern web development. Creating great content is all about flow, and that's a flow that's undermined when you're continually thinking about the right approach to converting it for the web. While Markup can be a tool for people who know little about HTML, it's also a great tool for experienced developers who know the language but don't want to go through the tedious labor of converting artistic content into web accessible content. It's a utility tool, and one that takes the busy work out of design. Paragraphs are automatically converted into paragraph tags, while stylistic elements like italics and bold are similarly transferred over to the markup language. There are a huge number of tags supported which can be access with simple shortcuts, but what's especially great about this program is how much control you have over it. A simple checklist allows you to pick and choose the tags and macros you want to incorporate into your code, rendering it the same level of customization you'll find in a text editor designed for more complex coding languages like Python and JavaScript. Markdown has been around for quite some time, and the great thing is how intuitive it is. Many of the shortcuts utilized are a standard in everyday internet conversations. Asterisks convert your language to em tags, for instance. HTML is simple but tedious. Markdown is equally simple but less tedious. While it may be a specialized tool, it's worthwhile for anyone who has to write HTML on a regular basis. The learning curve is pretty much non-existent, and you'll find yourself writing in Markdown language by second nature pretty quickly.