It’s always surprised me when people, especially technical people, say they don’t know Markdown. Do you not use GitHub? Stack Overflow? Reddit?
I get that an average person may not understand how Markdown is based on simple old-school plaintext ASCII typing conventions. Like when you’re *really* excited
Let me open with an apology to John Gruber for my previous blog post.
We’ve been working on the Standard Markdown project for about two years now. We invited John Gruber, the original creator of Markdown, to join the project via email in November 2012, but never heard back.
In 2009 I lamented the state of Markdown:
Right now we have the worst of both worlds. Lack of leadership from the top, and a bunch of fragmented, poorly coordinated community efforts to advance Markdown, none of which are officially canon. This isn’t merely incovenient for anyone trying to
Markdown is a simple little humane markup language based on time-tested plain text conventions from the last 40 years of computing.
Meaning, if you enter this…
…you get this!
Lightweight Markup Languages
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According to **Wikipedia**:
> A [lightweight markup language](http://is.gd/gns)
is a markup language with a
I'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset:
Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read
Markdown was one of the humane markup languages that we evaluated and adopted for Stack Overflow. I've been pretty happy with it, overall. So much so that I wanted to implement a tiny, lightweight subset of Markdown for comments as well.
I settled on these three commonly used