Let’s talk metadata for a minute.
In the beginning there was HTML.
And HTML begat Markdown.
And Markdown begat MultiMarkdown.
And MultiMarkdown made explicit provision for metadata: additional fields carrying information about a Markdown document.
And then YAML front matter came along, which was another way of specifying metadata for a Markdown document.
But Notenik has been supporting Markdown metadata for at least ten years, going back to the original version, written in Java.
In Notenik, we just call them fields.
All of these formats – MultiMarkdown, YAML front matter, and Notenik – are slightly different, and Notenik supports all three. But basically these are just three different, but very similar, ways of supporting name-value pairs within text files that also contain Markdown.
But there is a difference between Notenik’s use of metadata vs. the way this info is used in other apps.
In all cases, metadata supplies variables that can be used when formatting a Markdown document.
But with Notenik:
Each different collection of text files, stored in its own folder, can have its own specific definition of the types and names of fields to be found within that collection;
The metadata is used, not just to format and identify documents, but as a means of organizing the files within a collection, so that the collection itself becomes an entity with its own characteristics. Add a date field, and then you can sort by date. Add an author field, and you can sort by author. Add a status field, and you can separate completed items from ones still in work.
Metadata is the basis of many of Notenik’s most powerful functions, so it’s good to get a handle on what it is and how it can be used.
tags: MultiMarkdown, YAML, fields, metadata