Markdown – The easy way to write HTML

We use HTML almost for everything, it’s simple text with extra attributes like bold, italic etc. This attributes (tags) are parsed by browser in order to display the text.

Writing HTML is not easy always especially if you are writing a book, docs or a long blog post. You have to remember the tags. Add <p> tag to every paragraph.

What is Markdown?

The Markdown makes it easy to generate HTML formatted text.

It was a project by John Gruber and Aaron Swartz. Yes, the guy who started Creative Commons. Project website

How it works?

It replaces simple formatting characters with HTML tags.

For example text surrounded with ** becomes bold, text surrounded with ` gets enclosed by ‘code’ tag.

Using Markdown makes the task easy because

• You don’t have to remember the all tags
• Someone who is new to HTML can easily understand the Markdown
• It makes it easy to read the raw text

Where it is used?

Instead of writing the direct answer, I will tell you when I came across Markdown first time.

Back in 2013, while commenting on issues on GitHub I saw one short note, Markdown is supported. Clicking on that note took me to the small cheat sheet of Markdown styling. I thought that is something nice, I will need it some day.

Similar note is still there on GitHub which takes you to the Mastering Markdown page (Impressive).

I used Markdown while fixing some of the mistakes from Docker Docs

GitHub’s online editor provides preview as well.

Here is the preview of one file from Docker Docs.

Some Links

• You can use this online tool to write Markdown and convert it to HTML.

  Markdown Web Dingus

• Follow this guide to convert Markdown to HTML locally on your computer. Learning Markdown

• Markdown: The Ins and Outs

This post is written using Markdown and Dingus tool. link to raw file