In a reply to my WhySimpleMarkup post, Chris Wage wrote , inpart:

I like the idea of a simple markup language, but the reality is thatthey are implemented in an obscure and often counter-intuitivefashion.

I'll unfortunately agree with this; it's one reason why I created myown for DWiki . Pretty much all of the existing wikitext dialects Ilook at struck me as ugly to see, tiresome to write, or both. Lookinggood as plain text and being easy to write in

Hotmail seems to be shuffling its numbers around significantly thisweek, to my surprise. I'm not sure the result is really better, butit's certainly different:

• 4 email messages accepted from Hotmail, although 3 of them look alot like typical advance fee fraud spam Hotmail addresses.
• only 79 messages rejected because they came from non-Hotmail emailaddresses.
• 138 messages sent to our spamtraps.
• 27 messages refused because their sender addresses had already hitour spamtraps.
• 20 messages refused due

I'm a big fan of simple markup languages for writing web pages (or infact any sort of document; it just happens that web sites are prettymuch everything I write these days). Recently I figured out a goodexpression of why:

Simple markup languages are the same idea as high level programminglanguages: less make-work and more of what actually matters.

(And as an added bonus, less interruption of my writing to sprinkleHTML all over.)

Languages like C and Java have a bunch