Am using this entry to test two typographical plugins—John Gruber’s MarkDown and SmartyPants.
So far they seem to work. Let’s see how it works out on an on-going basis.
MarkDown is designed to make generating HTML from plaintext much easier. Instead of having to mess around with html codes when, say, making a list, it automatically translates what you type into the appropriate HTML. The advantages of this are:
- It’s faster and easier than having to type HTML tags by hand.
- It reduces the chances that one would forget to close a tag (not that that would ever happen to me), and would, at least in theory, generate cleaner code.
The syntax seems pretty straight-forward and easy to learn. One wishes that the link syntax supported targets, as is my preference, but nobody’s perfect, eh?
On the other hand, all SmartyPants does is generate curly quotes and other typographical entities… like ellipses and n- and m-dashes. Think of it as a way to make things just look prettier.
Paul, you may be interested in reST on this topic, too...
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
We use it on our CMS.