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You might have noticed that–in a fit of Spring zeal–I’ve restyled blockquotes (again). While I liked the previous style with graphical quote marks, it was a bit greedy on space and also didn’t scale well. If you have a short quote, the size of the quote graphics is out of proportion to the height of the text, and rather overpowers it.

I think that the new style is distinctive, but a little more subtle. Let me know what you think.

I went to the dentist yesterday, and found out that–as I had feared–I will have to have my rogue upper-left wisdom tooth removed. I’ve already had both lower wisdom teeth out as I don’t have enough room on my lower jaw for even the full adult set of teeth, but I was hoping that I might get away with the upper one. Being the kind of free-thinking, radical, out-there tooth that it is, this wisdom tooth seems to have decided that growing straight down is for squares, and that jutting out at a jaunty angle would be much more groovy. It’s now poking into my cheek in a somewhat uncomfortable way, and generally making a nuisance of itself when it comes to brushing the other teeth.

The dentist breezily said that she could ’slip the tooth out’ very quickly, but previous experience tells me nothing about the process is either easy or painless. What makes it all the more galling is the expense; I can afford it and still pay the rent, but if I’m going to spend £70 on anything, I would much rather blow it on something fun like a few nice meals out or some CDs–anything but a couple of days of intense pain and soup-eating.

I just thank my lucky stars that I don’t have an exotic but complicated dental condition like sarah.

John Gruber has produced another text-to-HTML filter, called Markdown. I use Textile extensively when writing this weblog, and find it very useful. I do know how to write HTML, and I don’t find it particularly hard, but using a filter like this just makes it a bit quicker to write–and perhaps more importantly–easier to read and edit. If there’s too much ‘code furniture’ on a page, it can be hard to pick up spelling or grammatical errors. Sometimes it’s hard to motivate yourself to write, and then any kind of barrier between you and the words on the screen becomes more significant.

Markdown has a smaller syntax set than Textile, but it seems that this is deliberate. It only allows you to encode the kind of HTML formatting that can be represented with plain text. As John Gruber explains:

Markdown is not a replacement for HTML, or even close to it. Its syntax is very small, corresponding only to a very small subset of HTML tags. The idea is not to create a syntax that makes it easier to insert HTML tags. In my opinion, HTML tags are already easy to insert. The idea for Markdown is to make it easy to read, write, and edit prose. HTML is a publishing format; Markdown is a writing format. Thus, Markdown’s formatting syntax only addresses issues that can be conveyed in plain text.

This produces very clean markup, which is extremely readable. I particularly like the ability to form reference style links. To keep the main text as uncluttered as possible, you can refer to a URL as follows:

[Google][1]

and have all the referenced URLs listed anywhere else in the document like so:

[Google]: http://www.google.com "Optional title"

It works very neatly and makes it much easier to accumulate links at the bottom of the document as you are researching and writing, and then mark up the links in the text (the references at the bottom are converted to proper inline URLs).

I also like the fact that you can use Markdown to filter text files at the command line, or as a Unix filter in BBEdit, so that you can easily convert any piece of text intended for the web. I’m going to use the filter for a while and see if I get on with it–if I do, I’ll set up the preferences so that you can also use Markdown in the comments.

Update: For those of you not reading the comments, John Gruber pointed out an error in my examples. With the URL given in the text as:

[Google][1]

you need a reference like this:

[1]: http://www.google.com "Optional title"