B10[mg]

The title of this entry might seem a little blunt, yet it is how I feel at the moment. I always loved HTML and often even spent a lot of time to check out W3C to keep up to date.

The reason I dislike it is fairly simple: too much typing.

I know, I can use products such as Dreamweaver, or FrontPage, or way too many other WYSIWYG editors to avoid typing, yet I never really gotten to like them either (and yes, I do realize they don't produce the crap output that they used to do anymore). And, it doesn't solve the real problem here, that it's fairly unreadable.

Let's look at an example. For instance, when I want to emphasize something, I would use <em>something</em>. It takes me nine characters to make your browser understand that I want to put emphasis on one word.

Most browser will use italics for that emphasis. Now if I'd use POD, I'd type I<something>, a lot shorter, with the same result.

Because I'm obviously not the only one who is lazy enough to dislike all the typing/reading, people started coming up with other methods to generate ugly HTML out of more readable, workable, editable markup languages.

Currently, Textile seems to be my favorite, and I'm happy to type my blog entry in that right now. But a very reasonable other markup language is Markdown.

In Textile, I'd type _something_ to put emphasis on something, and Markdown would accept *something* and also the Textile approach. That is a hell of a lot easier to type and a hell of a lot easier to read!

Now why do we really want to use (X)HTML? Probably because changing the HTML standard would involve a lot of problems and frankly, I'm not perfectly happy with either Textile, Markdown, POD or any other markup language for that matter ;-)

Oh well, by now you should understand that I just had to write (and format) a document in HTML, which I thought would be small enough to hack directly in HTML, but turned out too big that I wish I started in Textile...

html, textile, markdown