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Show HN: Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents

79 points| arturadib | 13 years ago |strapdownjs.com | reply

14 comments

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[+] mattmanser|13 years ago|reply
I do like it, one question though, anyone can speculate as to why he says use an xmp tag, but then himself uses a textarea on the page? And will google index it?
[+] arturadib|13 years ago|reply
Good question. I used <textarea> since I have the unusual circumstance of having to write down "</xmp>" in my Markdown, which would close the opening <xmp> if I had one :)

Most users won't have to do this.

Google does index <xmp>, see e.g. the search result for "devo site:www.the-pope.com". The word "devo" is inside <xmp>.

[+] taylorfausak|13 years ago|reply
I hadn't heard of the <xmp> tag before now. His reasoning ("so that users don't have to escape special HTML characters") seems to be correct, except that it's a deprecated tag (http://stackoverflow.com/q/4545). Perhaps he used a <textarea> on this page so he could have the literal "</xmp>" in it?
[+] __chrismc|13 years ago|reply
The .js seems to allow for either.

I would speculate (after no more than a cursory glance) that using the xmp tag is the Google-indexable method of writing your page? Google should see it as plain text on a web page.

Textarea support could be to provide interactive/editable pages?

[+] Alexandervn|13 years ago|reply
And if Google can index this, it probably values all text the same; it's just plain text.
[+] fijter|13 years ago|reply
I like the use of markdown for this kind of purpose but i'd rather just compile from markdown to the generated HTML and put that online for a better user experience (no flash of unstyled markdown content) and possibly better Google indexing.
[+] arturadib|13 years ago|reply
That's fair. I personally wrote Strapdown since I couldn't find a really simple Markdown framework that generated beautiful docs and Just Worked(TM) :)
[+] desireco42|13 years ago|reply
I really love this approach. It simplifies a lot of back and forth that I have to do on a server, even with all the plugins to make things easier, front end is the right place to do this. So, thank you.
[+] marban|13 years ago|reply
Did someone come across any stats about markdown adoption/acceptance among regular users over richtext editors?