| date | published | categories | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
2023-09-12 |
true |
notes |
|
A plaintext "markup language" that is itself readable without any processing, by common plaintext conventions:
The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.
— John Gruber, creator of Markdown (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/)
A lot of people question the syntactical decisions made in Markdown, but they're not decisions the original creator, John Gruber, really made, but conventions he adopted from mailing lists, IRC, and other plaintext communication mediums.
For example: lists are just dashes. Common in any plaintext format found in emails.
Or > for quotes? Well that's just how email quotes work!
What about *foo* for emphasis? That's been a common form of informal markup for decades to emphasize text.
Underlining "titles" with === or ---? Also common, especially in README files.
So what I'm getting at is, Markdown didn't come up with these, it just brought them together, and normalized using them as a mapping to HTML.
GFM is probably the most popular implementation in use, and is implemented along with its various extensions on GitHub, Discord, Reddit, and various sites and services.
HackMD is a great online collaborative note/documentation app, which has a self-hosted option. It uses markdown-it for processing, and thus includes a ton of really useful extensions.
Probably the best Markdown parser, as it is used on most platforms client-side ([[JavaScript]]).
It has a lot of useful plugins/extensions: