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About |
All Things Markdown is a website to learn all about Markdown and ways you can work with and use Markdown in various scenarios.
According to John Gruber of Daring Fireball Markdown is:
a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
HTML is great for presenting the information for the web. But, writing HTML in that nice format is not simple and easy without some tools and real understanding of the HTML (the markup language) with its rules and syntax.
One would use Markdown when you want to write documents or web pages but do not want to learn all the details of the HTML.
Some Examples:
- Write a school report or essay with quotes, references and links
- Write a news story with pictures or videos
- Write an article for a blog or website
Markdown, unlike HTML, is meant for anyone to write with a simple editor without an understanding of many rules and syntax of the HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The Markdown got an opposite name of Markup: Markdown.
To write a bold text you would just use a simple keyboard characters **, before and after the text, to make that part of the text bold. If you were to do the same in HTML then you would have to use HTML tags such as <strong> before and </strong> after the text. So, you see, the markdown does not use special tags or commands or syntax to markup the text.
The Markdown processor understands the text that is written in markdown format and converts it into HTML format.
You would use markdown if HTML is not your thing. If you want to publish documents on the web/Internet then these documents have to be prepared in HTML format. Writing documents in HTML format is not for everyone.
Writing HTML is not a complex task and is not difficult to learn. However, if you are not a developer or computer programmer, there is no huge advantage in learning to write documents in HTML.
There are some editors or tools that let you write documents in HTML. These tools look just like a word processor such as Microsoft Word. That is not a bad alternative. But, Markdown is much better.
Here is why Markdown is much better:
- it lets you use a simple editor (like notepad) to write the documents
- anyone can open these Markdown documents in a simple editor
- you can easily compare markdown documents line by line or character by character
- you can copy and paste markdown text as is in to an email
- you can read it and undestand even in its raw form in an editor
- examples of Markdown