Reflective Blog Post on What is Markup?

This is one of the first weeks where I truly feel like I have a good grasp of the reading. HTML is very confusing to me so when markdown was introduced I was very excited to get to learn more about it and I feel like I could use it very easily after completing the class readings and activities.

While going over the material for this week I was looking up other articles and videos and found this short article that I found interesting even though it is from 2012. It is called 3 Reasons Why Everyone Needs to Learn Markdown.

In the article, the author, Jon Mitchell, describes markdown like so, “Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Thus, ‘Markdown’ is two things: (1) a plain-text formatting syntax; and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text formatting to HTML.” I like this definition because it plainly gives you almost all the information you need to understand markdown.

It also mentions one big thing that you can use HTML in markdown which to some people is a really big thing. However, for me, this doesn’t attract me to markdown; what attracts me to markdown is the simplicity of it.

In this article, Jon Mitchell gives these 3 reasons for why everyone should learn markdown: easy on the eyes, fewer errors, and kill your CMS. When talking about being easy on the eyes it shows something written in markdown compared to HTML to prove the point. When I say that markdown is more simple I think what I mean is that it is easy on the eyes making it easy to read. Next, he brings up the point that people have fewer errors in markdown. I think this is due to the fact that in markdown you can see mistakes easier than you can in HTML. The last point he brings up is that it kill your CMS, this is the first point in the article where I was like hm I don’t know what CMS is! After reading through this section I understand that what he was referring to how you can use other applications to write in markdown and then paste it into your CMS.

I love the simplicity of this article because it perfectly describes markdown and the simplicity of it compared to HTML. After this week I cannot wait to use markdown on one of our other assignments and see if I can do any better with it than I did with HTML. haha

The further we go into the weeks of the class, the more confident I become in my knowledge of all things coding! This week I added more details to my site and customized what certain links look like! check out the new about me tab on my page! Can’t wait to continue furthering my knowledge and skills next week!

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