Excursus

Not Weapons of Mass Destruction, nor even Word and the North Korean Missile Crisis, but Wysiwym MarkDown editor.

As discussed in a previous post Mardown is an edge case of markup. A marked-up document contains:

• text
• information about that text

A markup language determines:

1. what markup is allowed
2. what markup is required
3. how the markup is explicitly distinguished from the text
4. what the markup means

The problem, of course, is with the third requirement. So much of Markdown is implicitly determined that it fails to determine how the markup is explicitly distinguished from the text. The very name is an ironic tribute to this feature—what’s the opposite of markup? Markdown!

Nevertheless, this “plain text formatting syntax”, though not strictly speaking a markup language, can serve as a gentle introduction to markup languages for the uninitiated. It can so serve since the goal of Markdown was to be human readable and hence to be immediately familiar and accessible:

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

WMD threatens to blur the boundry even further. Just as there is a distinction between information about the text being implicitly and explicitly determined, there is a distinction between visually editing this information, structurally editing this information with explicit markup. Information about the text can be visually edited, say, by bolding headers in a rich text editor. A visual element of the text, the boldface, carries implicit information about that text—that headers are in boldface. Visually editing is introducing implicit information about the text by editing the visual elements of that text. This could rather be represented by explicit markup, in which case one would be structurally editing the text. Editing your text with Markdown, while not explicit markup, is an edge case of structural editing. WMD streatches this further by offering a Wysiwym (What You See Is What You Mean) editor that produces either Markdown or HTML.

Intrigued by markup, but too shy to dip your toe? WMD may be for you.