Markdown

Writing HTML by hand sucks. Even if you're a grubby front-end programmer, you probably don't want to write entire documents in raw HTML.

Writing Markdown is pure bliss. Markdown is a less-verbose markup language designed for ease of writing. The trouble is web browsers don't understand Markdown. They only understand HTML and CSS. The #1 job of a static site generator is to convert Markdown into HTML.

Instead of writing a verbose HTML list:

<ul>
  <li>I really</li>
  <li>hate writing</li>
  <li>in raw html</li>
</ul>

We can write this in Markdown:

- I really
- hate writing
- in raw html

Our static site generator will take a directory of Markdown files (one for each web page), and build a directory of HTML files. Because we're not savages, we'll also include a single CSS file to style the site.