Standoff markup is way to encode rich text that has some great benefits. Unfortunately, most people aren't aware what it enables and why it's better than more familiar ways to represent text like Markdown or HTML.

In this explainer, I show how standoff markup encodes text and provide comparisons to Markdown and HTML.

Interactive Demo

GitHub Repo

Recent Activity

For my &standoff visualizer, added the ability to show underline styles and save the text and annotations to URL's query string. Now you can share a specific set of annotations and query strings via URL.

Show markup as Markdown is now supported in the &standoff visualizer.

Ok, my little &standoff visualizer can now show the HTML so you can compare between a hierarchical format like HTML and standoff markup. Try out overlapping multiple italic and bold annotations to see how quirky the HTML can get!