The other day I was complimented, albeit in a jokey way, on the neat organisation of a word document I had produced.

I said nothing, I don’t have a working copy of word on my computer. I do have access, via glow, to the online version but I dislike browser based apps of this sort. I have never been a big fan or power user of word anyway.

My docx was not created with word but with TextMate, written in markdown. & converted with pandoc.

It occurred to me that it is a lot simpler to make a reasonable structured document with markdown than most other applications. Being limited to headings of different levels, paragraphs, lists and a few more formatting features could be seen as a good thing.

Might it be easier, in some alternative universe, for children to learn the basics of creating an organised document before opening word or other software behemoth.

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I wrote the above yesterday, in drafts in Markdown. Today I read that Markdown had been added to Onedrive for iPhone.

I knew Onedrive in the browser would display Markdown as my planning for class before I retired was written in Markdown. I could write at home and read in school.

So I had a look in the desktop browser and there is a create Markdown file in the list there too. It opens a basic in-browser editor.

It then occurred to me that maybe you could paste Markdown into word, so I tried that, in the online version of word, and yes you can.

Seems that AI is driving Markdown take up.

• So maybe teaching the kids Markdown is not so daft an idea.
• I am pretty sure I read that Doug Belshaw taught Markdown as a precursor to html in a kids computer club?
• Of course you can paste Markdown into WordPress, I am going to do that now.