markdown

background

• John Gruber's markdown

howto

• Mark Boszko's cheat sheet
  Name markdown files xxxxx.md

software (if needed)

• MarkDrop by Culturezoo, in the Mac App Store
• TextWrangler by Bare Bones Software, in the Mac App Store
• Textdown in the chrome webstore
• emacs, standard on linux; easy to find for windows and Mac.
• gedit, near-standard on linux, and comes with a markdown mode.

argument

Markdown is much easier to compose than html; as proof, compare the view source form of this web page with the raw markdown text. (file, as it is written.

It's easy to embed math, though your readers will need to install some fonts.

For a very similar idea, see this same page, but in a strapdown.js version.