Markdown syntax – simplifying writing in HTML

I’m probably pretty late catching on to this, because I’ve seen this kind of syntax in WIKI pages and even have even seen one of my colleagues in France (over our remote desktop net-meetings) take down his notes in this syntax, but only today while looking at the WordPress plugin did I ever get down to what seems to be the main thing.

I think this is one of those ideas that seems to be so simple and elementary that one might expect it should’ve been so obvious to anyone all the time, but of course only in retrospect… 😉 *after* having seen an implementation of it!

[Michael Fortin](http://www.michelf.com)’s [Markdown theme](http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown) in WordPress that I just enabled to write this post allows me to write HTML in simple plain text format using very simple and intuitive markers to HTMLize it.

Based on the original Perl version by [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/) – a good way way to get the hang of it would be to play around with the [Markdown dingus demo](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/dingus).

When technology is progressing so fast with the potential for applications to do more and more complex things, there are still some which are so down to earth, so beautiful, and so *simple yet powerful* to the end user (inspite of their internal complexity), and this one is definitely one of them.