Markdown

by Badri Sunderarajan · Mon 11 May 2015

I still remember when
I first heard about it.
.md—Markdown.
Huh? What is it?

It's a language specially
for formatting text
into a few styles like: italic,
bold, code, and cancelled text.

A whole new language
just for that simple task?
And why can't I just use
HTML, may I ask?

Too complex for newcomers
to learn quickly, is it?
A WYSIWYG editor
could help on their visit!

Developers don't have time to
learn yet another new lang
And normal bloggers? Well—
they just don't know that they can.

Neither simple for newcomers
who don't want to code,
nor feature-full for devs
with a lot on their load

But now I understand.

For simple docs, .htm
is too cumbersome to write.
WYSIWYGs don't give results,
if complex, without a fight.
But .md—Markdown
—it seems just right!


Fun fact from 2024: When migrating this file to my new Haunt-powered blog, I realised that strikethrough set was not in fact supported, so to make this poem work I ended up creating my own fork of the parser!