Easier text markup
Jekyll can use Markdown for marking… up text. It has a special syntax that is parsed into basic HTML, instead of manually writing it all out by hand.
It’s used by many, many things now: Google chats, Slack, Reddit, GitHub, Are.na, Notion, etc. Sometimes they have their own flavors that add special syntax, but the base stuff is the same. Often WYSIWYG text editors are just adding Markdown syntax around things!
- It’s often much easier to read the source.
- It is usually much quicker to write.
- Your changes (Git’s
diff) are clear. - And overall it is less error-prone.
…compared to writing all the elements/tags yourself! Markdown does have to be compiled/parsed out into HTML, but a lot of software does this behind the scenes.
I love Markdown. If there is only one thing you take away from our class, let it be some fluency in
.md. It’s the lingua franca for basic text formatting.