markdown

Toward a Better Markdown Tutorial

markdown

Toward a Better Markdown Tutorial

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

markdown

Standard Markdown is now Common Markdown

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.

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

markdown

Standard Flavored Markdown

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

programming languages

The Future of Markdown

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 ============================ According to **Wikipedia**: > A [lightweight markup language](http://is.gd/gns) is a markup language with a

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

markdown

Responsible Open Source Code Parenting

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments

regular expressions

Testing With "The Force"

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

By Jeff Atwood ·
Comments