mnvest/mn-equity-crowdfunding-legislation — pull request #3 by benbalter (2014-10-27 13:55:39+00:00)
Title: Store proposed legislation as Markdown

This pull request does two things:

1. Remove `draft-bill.docx` from version control. There are three reasons for this:

A. `.docx` is a proprietary format (Microsoft Word), cannot be viewed via the web (e.g., without downloading) and requires specific desktop software to open, all things ill suited for proposed legislations which should be available to all.

B. Binary formats like `.docx` are ill suited for version control, as it's not possible to track who made what change when. Put another way, I can change the `.docx` file, but there would be no way to know what was changed, either in the change history, or in a pull request.

C. Versioning the same document in two different formats (`.docx`, `.txt`) is an extremely efficient way to have two different versions of the same document, as it is extremely easy for the two to get out of sync.

2. Convert `draft-bill.txt` to `draft-bill.md`, making appropriate whitespace adjustements so that it is properly parsed as markdown. The biggest advantages here, is that the document is now rendered as HTML, rather than displaying the raw text, meaning you have a human-friendly (e.g., non-monospace) font, and text is wrapped to the browser view, rather than flowing off the edge of the screen.