# Markdown

Markdown is a markup language with plain text formatting syntax designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.

## History

John Gruber, with substantial contributions from Aaron Swartz, created the Markdown language in 2004 with the goal of enabling people "to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, and optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML)".

Taking cues from existing conventions for marking up plain text in email, such as setext, the language was designed to be readable as-is, without looking like it's been marked up with tags or formatting instructions, unlike text formatted with a markup language, such as Rich Text Format (RTF) or HTML, which have obvious tags and formatting instructions.

## Standardization

There is no clearly defined Markdown standard, apart from the original writeup and implementation by John Gruber, which some consider to be abandonware. This has led to fragmentation as different vendors write their own variants of the language to correct flaws or add missing features.

From 2012 through 2014, a group of people including Jeff Atwood launched what Atwood characterized as a standardization effort. A community website now aims to "document various tools and resources available to document authors and developers, as well as implementors of the various markdown implementations". In September 2014, Gruber objected to the usage of "Markdown" in the name of this effort and it was rebranded as a new dialect named "CommonMark".

## Editors

While Markdown is a minimal markup language and is easily read and edited with a normal text editor, there are specially designed editors that preview the files with styles. There are a variety of such editors available for all major platforms. There are syntax highlighting plugins for Markdown built into emacs, gedit, and vim.

## GitHub Flavored Markdown

GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) adds syntax highlighting, task lists, and tables. It has several implementations:

- "Grip - Github Readme Instant Preview" (Joe Esposito) - Python
- "Vim-Flavored-Markdown" (Jeff Tratner) - Vim scripting
- "GitHub-Flavored Markdown Comments" (Evan Solomon) - PHP WordPress plugin
- "Markdown on Save" (Mark Jaquith) - PHP WordPress plugin
- "Node-GFM" (Gabriel Llamas) - JavaScript
- "Parsedown" (Emanuil Rusev) - PHP

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This article uses material from the Wikipedia article ["Markdown"][1], which is released under the [Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0][2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown
[2]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/