Stephen Downes

This is an interesting article though I don't exactly agree with it. It describes 'markdown', a system some text editors use to allow writers to create bold, italics, lists, headers and links without using complex HTML or even more complex .docx formats. Though the article attributes markdown to John Gruber and Aaron Swartz, it draws on conventions people used for decades in text-only editors, for example, **bold** for bold. What makes it different is you can run markdown text through an interpreter and it will produce nice HTML format for you. The article says "As a professional writer, you probably don't care much about bold, italics, and underline, while you write," but from my on perspective, I care quite a lot about formatting. Via Stephen Harlow.