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<h1 class="main-header">The Spartan Blog</h1>
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<h1><a href="/posts/markup-generation-for-the-masses.html">Markup Generation for the Masses</a></h1>
<p>When I first started working on an open source project (which I later canned and deleted) the first ‘hurdle’ I encountered turned out to be the README file. It wasn’t the README file or the concept of it that had me confused; I was utterly confused when I searched for example readme files and discovered a wide range of beautifully formatted text documents that had headers and links and tables and all kinds of wonderful things. It wasn’t until I dug around a lot more that I came across the concept of <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.text">markdown</a> and went through all its <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax">syntactic nuances</a>. Why was markdown created? According to the maker of this form of markup, </p>
“<em>The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing form</em><em>at.”</em><p>Seemed simple enough, <em><strong>except</strong></em>, it’s simple only if you are a programmer; only if you are someone who is familiar with how markup languages worked. If however, you are but a layman in such areas, then reading how to use #s before and after a line to make it a header 1 will be just as difficult to understand as using an h1 tag. I agree with the sentiment of making a markup language easier to write and read but I don’t believe that it makes it any easier to access for a newcomer. Note that I understand that no one is saying that it makes it any easier; it irks me though that no one seems to want to build the tools to make it easier to access for people. </p>
<p>It then got me thinking. Apart from some large tools such as Dreamweaver, or isolated pieces of software, there really was no way for anyone, whether layman or experienced to actually have a WYSIWYG experience for writing documents for the web. If you want markdown there are <a href="http://markable.in/editor/">dedicated</a> great looking <a href="https://github.com/Code52/DownmarkerWPF">tools</a> out there. There are similar tools for HTML. But in the end, they suffer from the same fundamental issues.</p>
<ul>
<li>They assume your knowledge of the markup syntax instead of attempting to abstract it away from the user. This is wrong for obvious reasons. If you are going to be typing in the markup language, having a preview of what you are typing doesn’t really solve the issue at hand. </li>
<li>They don’t give the user the comfort of the tools they’ve already learnt. </li>
<li>They are separate from each other. None of them actually give a one size fits all experience simply because they attempt to be the editors as well. Attempting to be the editor is actually a complex problem and solving it for one type of markup is a large undertaking by itself.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of these issues I really wanted to address the one of not making a user switch out of the tool they already had. Being able to use a tool like Microsoft Word to create your documents and then generate the markup from the documents is important since it allows the user to use the tools they are familiar with and also helps the documents stay decoupled from the software. Since it’s most likely that the people will have word processing software that they can use to share and work on documents together it would be silly to expect them to use a completely different software to create documents all over again. I felt it would be a lot better to let them type in the documents and apply their header one and two formatting using the software that they were already used to. After all, when I wanted to start creating HTML and markdown documents I was wishing I could just use Microsoft Word and get it done. And you know what they say. When you’ve got a problem, chances are, other people have that problem too. This led me to build my first real open source project, <a href="https://github.com/kiriappeee/Word-To-Markup-Converter">Word to Markup Generator</a>. While it is far from complete, it is complete enough to allow me to have typed up this document in word and have it converted to HTML with ease. If you would like to see it in action, get thee a copy of visual studio 2010 express (or higher), download the code and compile. I haven’t added an installer yet and I probably won’t until I’m sure that the software isn’t going to ruin someone’s life if they try to use this in production code. I have some big plans for the future of this software as well as how I want to help bring writing for the web and ownership of data to the masses. </p>
<p>Sometimes, the geek’s definition of creating something for humans isn’t good enough. Sometimes we’ve got to realize that ‘dead simple’ is ‘dead greek’ for people who aren’t versed in computer speak. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s our responsibility to bridge that gap with the software we write and I’m hoping the future of the Word to Markup Generator will be a step forward in that direction. </p>
<p class="post-time">Posted on <a href="/posts/markup-generation-for-the-masses.html">18th February 2013</a> <a href="/posts/markup-generation-for-the-masses.html#disqus_thread"></a></p>
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<h1><a href="/posts/the-first-post.html">The First Post</a></h1>
<p>Oh yes. This is yet another one of those first posts that litter the little universe that is the internet. For me, this is a post to signal that I have finally got my static site up and running. This isn’t going to be a very long post but this is mostly a test using a software I’ve built to convert word documents to a markup document of choice. You can check it out on my github (I still haven’t built link recognition into it, so I can’t link anything right now) and help me extend it if you can. Once I get the link functionality built in I shall probably do my post on it which shouldn’t take much longer hopefully. In the meantime, I shall quietly celebrate the mundane achievement of creating my first site from scratch using CSS and HTML written purely by me (no copy pastes here) that I started learning only two weeks ago and of posting my first post purely generated by the software I wrote. </p>
<p class="post-time">Posted on <a href="/posts/the-first-post.html">16th February 2013</a> <a href="/posts/the-first-post.html#disqus_thread"></a></p>
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