μ

μ (a.k.a. MU a.k.a. Mark Up a.k.a. Made Up) is a markup/templating language heavily inspired by markdown and moustache templating, that is being slapped together on the fly to build this site.

Note: This document is itself written using μ; you can see the source for it by replacing '.html' with '.md' in the URL.

μ is intended to be as easy-to-read, easy-to-code, and easy-to-write as is feasible. Unlike markdown, μ provides only a single way to create most elements.

μ has a single canonical implementation which defines the 'standard'. This file is more of a test bed for new features than any attempt at definition.

Block Elements

Paragraphs and Line Breaks

A paragraph is simply one or more consecutive lines of text, separated by one or more blank lines.

Horizontal Rules

Horizontal Rules are three or more - or = on a line by themselves.

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Headers

μ headers begin with one or more # on a newline followed by a space, and continue to the end of the line. The number of opening hashes determines the header level.

Lists

μ supports ordered (numbered) and unordered (bulleted) lists.

Unordered lists use asterisks, pluses, and hyphens -- interchangably -- as list markers:

• Red
• Green
• Blue

Ordered lists use numbers followed by periods:

1. Bird
2. McHale
3. Parish

The actual numbers you use to mark the list have no effect on the HTML output μ produces.

To make lists look nice, you can wrap items with hanging indents, but you don't have to.

• Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam hendrerit mi posuere lectus. Vestibulum enim wisi, viverra nec, fringilla in, laoreet vitae, risus.
• Donec sit amet nisl. Aliquam semper ipsum sit amet velit. Suspendisse id sem consectetuer libero luctus adipiscing.

List nesting is determined by tab-level

1. first level
   • second level, and unordered
2. first level again

Code Blocks

μ wraps a code block in both <pre> and <code> tags.

Regular μ syntax is not processed within code blocks. E.g., asterisks are just literal asterisks within a code block. This means it's also easy to use μ to write about μ's own syntax.

tell application "Foo"
    beep
end tell

Span Elements

HTML Attributes

μ enables html elements to use a shorthand for attributes similar to css.

• .title .important becomes class="title important"
• #bourne becomes id="bourne"

Links and Images

μ supports links like [an example](http://example.com/ .exampleclass) an example.

images follow the same convention, with a prefix ! ![an example image](.favicon.jpg width="30" height="30").

:footnotes

:x footnotes

A footnote [^note] is translated into a nutshell link to a marker [:note](#note) which jumps to the note. The corresponding [^note]: marker is translated into a hidden nutshell section.

More Span Elements

Surrounding text with the following marks generates these elements:

• single asterisks - <em>
• 😂 - emojis from short names (this one is :joy:). Not sure I like this, but it works.
• double asterisks - <b>
• double tilde - <del>
• ^{double carets} - <sup>
• _{double underscores} - <sub>
  • ^over_under - putting superscript directly before subscript will wrap both in <span .supsub>, which can be made to appear one above the other with a little css. This specifically looks for ^^__ with no space between.
• single backtick - wraps in <code>, also escapes contents

Templating

• {{?layout}} indicates that what follows should use the file layout to wrap the rendered output
• {{.}} indicates that the wrapped content should be placed here
• {{!comments}} is a comment. It isn't included in the output html like <!--comments-->. I might remove this later
• {{>include.md}} - file include.md should be rendered and inlined here.
• {{var}} - insert value of environment variable