Markdown
A few days ago Jeff Atwood wrote Is HTML a Humane Markup Language?. The answer Jeff, is no. More and more today people with no experience in web design are starting blogs. Some might say they should go learn HTML but I disagree.
You started a blog because you had something to say right?
Just say it.
Many people would lose interest in a blog after starting it if the only way to proceed was to get assaulted by all those angle brackets. Not to mention losing your flow due to the “coding/prosing thrash” as l.m.orchard discusses here. If you read the philosophy behind markdown you will see that markdown was designed just for this reason.
Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.
In his article Jeff used four markup languages with some example text. Textile favors the use of abbreviations such as h1. and bq. While this is pretty readable I think it has a steeper learning curve than markdown. The use of > as a blockquote marker in markdown is probably understood by anyone who has ever seen a forwarded email. Wiki syntax comes out as very readable to me as well but it is clearly more suited for a wiki than a blog post, not to mention that it still uses angle brackets. And last but not least, BBcode looks like ass. 
My point is that the choice is clearly yours. Just consider your options and your comfort level when posting. If you are constantly losing your flow due to having to sling angle brackets then perhaps one of the more friendly markup languages is for you.
p.s. It should be noted that I’m not currently using markdown because I haven’t installed it since the move (and also I’m using scribefire on my posts, and still loving it).
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 0 people and commented on 0 times hide