The Markdown markup language is widely used on the Internet. It is used to create readme files and documentation, and its basic principles are used to format messages and publications in messengers and social networks.
Created by John Gruber and Aaron Schwartz in 2004, Markdown borrows many of its ideas from common standards for marking up text in emails. Various implementations of this language convert Markdown text into correctly structured XHTML by replacing “<” and “&” characters with appropriate entity codes.
The first version of Markdown was written by Gruber in Perl, but over time numerous alternative implementations from other developers have appeared. The Perl version is distributed under the BSD license. Markdown implementations are integrated or available as plugins in many content management systems.
Markdown is a simplified markup language designed for easy writing, reading, and design of web texts. The language is partially or fully supported by many projects, including content management systems and blogging platforms (e.g., Drupal, Ghost, Medium), large content repositories (GitHub, Microsoft Docs), messengers (Telegram, Slack), text editors (Atom, iA Writer, Typora), and project management services (Todoist, Trello).
Markdown is easily converted to HTML, can be opened in any text editor, and is easy to read even as source code. Writing in Markdown is much easier than in markup languages such as HTML, XML, TeX, and others.
Today, basic Markdown is rarely used by itself. Instead, various specifications and dialects that extend the capabilities of the language by adding features such as support for HTML tags, creating tables and checkboxes, strikethrough text, and various line breaks are more commonly used. When choosing a platform, it is important to consider support for these additional features.
The most popular is GitHub’s Flavored Markdown dialect, which is based on the CommonMark specification. This site uses the Markdown Editor, which supports most of the tools of the pair except checkboxes.
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