Excursus

In an ealier post I wrote about the power of plain text…and its perils. One of the perils of plain text, at least for a writer, is that it is unformatted. Formatting, however, is not merely aesthetic; it carries semantic significance—which can be crucial, especially with complex documents. The way to avoid this particular peril is, of course, to use some form of markup.

Printed prose carries implicit information about the structure of the text. Think, for example, how indentation can represent the beginning of a paragraph. Or how punctuation can represent the end of a sentence. Or how sectional titles can be represented by boldface. Markup makes explicit this implicit information in a way that can be represented in plain text.

Indeed, when faced with the task of writing a complex document in plain text, there is a spontaneous tendency to markup the text—if only in an ad hoc, and un-self-conscious manner. So one might enumerate section titles in title case:

1. My Section Title

Or, like Nietzsche, one might wrap a word or phrase in forward slashes to represent italics:

THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF / IRON / YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS

The problem is that such spontaneously hit upon conventions are ad hoc and are bound to lack the expressive power necessary for representing the structure of sufficiently complex documents. A recognized standard for markup also has the advantage of being machine processable. Not only can programs typeset a source in markup, but there are other advantages as well. Suppose you want your sections enumerated, but you have deleted a section or merged two sections. Given the above convention you would have to manually change the numbers of sections. It is much easier to have a program do this automagically for you.

I will be posting about markup, its history and theory, and hopefully some practical advice about choosing a system of markup suitable to your particular needs.