Why Write as HTML?

Longevity, openness, styling flexibility, and publication-readiness are all excellent reasons to do your writing in HTML format.

As a globally used, industry-standard format that mixes plain text with simple, human-readable annotations, HTML stands an extremely good chance of continuing to be supported by the writing, search, and publishing tools of the future. This makes it a great format to choose, even for local files of personal notes that you don’t intend to publish. With HTML, you can maintain openness, while gaining greater expressiveness than plain text affords.

Writing your content as HTML also gives you tremendous styling flexibility — especially if you take advantage of HTML’s extensibility to produce semantic markup using a consistent style set. When you structure a body of content using a shared vocabulary of HTML elements, classes, and ids, you gain the power to style it consistently using style sheets, and can change the typography and graphic design of that content with ease.

HTML is also the basis for many useful publishing destinations — from the World Wide Web at large, to blogging services, to ePub and Kindle eBook formats, to Mac application Help books such as TypeMetal’s Help.