Markdown Resources
Markdown is a plain-text formatting syntax that allows you to write in plain textfiles, and later convert those files to structurally valid XHTML or HTML.
The original Markdown specification, written by John Gruber, is here. The full syntax of original markdown, including a philosophical statement about the reason for its creation, is here.
You can write with Markdown in any word processing application as long as you save your file as plain text (with either a .txt extension or a .md extension, your choice, if you use file extensions in your naming conventions). Many text editing programs now incorporate Markdown into their toolset. Some of the more popular examples follow:
Dillinger, an online Markdown editor that simultaneously produces HTML 5
Marked 2 is slightly more specialized: it previews Markdown documents and allows you to apply stylesheets to them.
… and here’s a list of 78 more tools for writing and previewing Markdown. There are also many others, some dedicated to writing on mobile platforms like phones and tablets.
When it comes time to get your writing in Markdown into this site, the first thing you should do is convert it to HTML. Gruber’s Markdown Dingus converts Markdown to HTML, as do tools like the aforementioned Marked and DIllinger.
Once you have an HTML version of your text, create a new post on Amplab, then select the “Text” tab (top right of the text window) to open the text editor rather than the Visual editor, and paste in your HTML. If it doesn’t produce results that look the way you expected, see if you can figure out why.
You can move back and forth interchangeably between Visual and Text (HTML) editing modes. It’s easier to add pictures and videos in Visual mode, but take a look at the code after you do so and think about the syntax.
Markdown is not without its controversies. The creation of the Common Markdown specification (briefly “Standard Markdown”) a few weeks ago by a group of developers that didn’t include John Gruber was met with a firestorm of criticism (beginning with this tweet from Gruber himself), but other variants, like MultiMarkdown, have existed for years.
What all of this demonstrates is that the ideology behind Alan Liu’s Discourse Network 2000 is in full effect. There are real issues at stake in terms of how content and presentation are articulated together, and they are present in even the most innocuous of our tools.
