I recently wrote how difficult it was to read a fully marked up latex document. XML is, in my view, worse despite all the hype that it's human readable; mostly it's not.

Usually when you're writing something, you don't need a whole lot of markup, because the document's are not normally that complex. What's important is that whatever format you choose to finally display that document, works for that document. Lightweight markup is ideal for this end.

Another advantage of lightweight markup is that you don't need any bloated word processor or other complex programme; it can be edited in your favourite text editor.

There are plently of good lightweight markup languages that do the job and plenty of tools to convert them into formats for publication, such as Latex or HTML.

Markdown

Not only does Markdown have a cool name, it is implemented in many languages inclundling perl and python.

Textile

Textile is very easy to read, largely because web links don't have to be in the body of the text. Textile has implementations in perl and python.

BBCode

BBCode is widely used markup languages, because many bulletin boards use it. Personally, I find it cludgy, because it's almost like using html, which, to my mind defeats the purpose of using a lightweight markup language in the first time. Why not just use html? Here's an implementation in perl.

WikiText

WikiText is a is used in many wiki's in particular on Wikipedia. It has a wide feature set, but unlike Textile the links have to be in the text. Here is an implementation in perl.

POD

Plain Old Documentation is used to document perl source code. It is simple and produces easy to read documents. Apparently, books have been written using it. Here is a module to covern POD to HTML.

These are a few of the most popular. At the moment I'm using Textile, chiefly because it doesn't require long urls in the text, but allows them to be put at the bottom (or anywhere else) in the document.

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