markdown



 Markdown  is a way of writing and interpreting plain text so that it can optionally be converted to more explicitly meaningful or richly styled text like HTML. Markdown is often used in README files and some online discussion forums.

Readability
As readable as possible is the most important Markdown design goal. "The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible."

IndieWeb Examples
Indieweb participants using markdown on their personal site, for authoring text posts (e.g. notes, articles), editing text, and sometimes publishing / syndicating text.

See and incorporate from storage


 * User:Sandeep.io writes in markdown and publishes it directly in a hidden div. It is intended as lossless, plaintext content for comments and replies since 2013-06-11
 * uses markdown for post authoring and storage since 2013-10-13. E.g.
 * http://rhiaro.co.uk/posts/150403-2255_MicropubTest.md
 * uses markdown for post authoring and storage since ????-??-?? E.g.
 * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcomnes/bcomnes.github.io/master/_posts/quill.p3k.io/2015-03-28-173-of-unreleased-ap.md
 * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcomnes/bcomnes.github.io/master/_posts/notes/2015-03-17-kilauea.md
 * https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bcomnes/bcomnes.github.io/master/_posts/notes/2015-04-03-clbp.md
 * uses markdown for articles, small notes and webmention's to keep his markdown "clean" each type of article is handled by a specific Jinja2 template. Since ????-??-?? (URL to MD source?)
 * uses markdown for post authoring and storage since ????-??-?? (URL to MD source?)

Alternatives
Lightweight markup alternatives to Markdown being used or considered by IndieWeb community members:
 * MediaWiki syntax - just to edit our wiki
 * (everyone)
 * undefined Thoughts on Markdown - analysis, alternate syntax proposals, and some implementation
 * needs a name

Dialects
Markdown comes in many flavors...


 * basic Gruber Markdown
 * Github-Flavored Markdown
 * StackOverflow Markdown
 * MultiMarkdown
 * Markaround
 * kramdown (basic plus some extensions from PHP Markdown and Maruku)
 * Markdown Extra ( also the base of many other flavor )

And has many extensions to the basic syntax:
 * Meta-data syntax implemented by Maruku

Summaries of Markdown flavors and specifications:
 * http://johnmacfarlane.net/babelmark2/faq.html

There is a joint work on documenting expected behaviour and specification for extended features in an attempt called Commonmark. While at first it looks like yet another flavour, due to the extensive documentation, it may as well become a common ground.

Not pretty
readable but not pretty - aaronpk in IRC

sometimes looks funny - bret in IRC

if it looks funny, it's failed as markdown [per its own overriding readability principle] - tantek in IRC

Underspecified

 * Under-specified, leads to many implementations, fragmentation. e.g.,

GitHub-Flavored Markdown

vs. kramdown

vs. Python-Markdown with CodeHilite (though you can enable the  extension to support all three syntaxes in Python-Markdown)

Not escapable
Markdown has no way specified way of escaping characters when used in a Markdown context.

For example, the Gitlab Slack integration uses Markdown to mark up messages, which breaks when the commit-message contains Markdown characters.

Example:

Becomes:

considered harmful
Markdown considered harmful

ugly enough to consider separate text plain
See: https://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2016-06-03#t1464937740573 "it said i have to write the email in markdown. it didn't say it was going to send the markdown as the text/plain part of the email. the preview only showed it to me as html" "undefined well if markdown adhered to its principles it would work *just fine* as the text/plain part"

And: https://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2016-06-03#t1464938023495 "wait does that mean my hyperlinks came through in markdown format too?" Thus pointing out the particularly ugly / plain text unfriendly format of links in Markdown, that it would cause surprise/consternation that such formatting might be shown to other users.

Firefox Addon

 * https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer

Articles
Articles, blog posts, opinions about markdown (in particular from IndieWeb community members)


 * 2016-04-27 You Should Probably Blog in Markdown
 * 2014-11-09 hReview Microformats in Markdown. Please note that this article uses the older hReview microformat, it's listed here as an example of how a template language like Jinja2 can aid in generating html when using Mardown.
 * 2010-10-16 Thoughts on Markdown by Dr. Drang (has some particular thoughts on tables, definition lists, footnotes)

Sessions
IndieWebCamp sessions that discussed markdown:
 * 2013/Citations_and_Scholarly_Markdown

Tools

 * Pandoc is a format converter which understands most dialects of Markdown
 * Babelmark 2 is a behaviour/output tester for numerous implementations of Markdown parsers

Other Alternatives
Using a minimum amount of features to make your markup cross-compatible:
 * Common markup for Markdown and reStructuredText

Comparison table of a few, relatively well-known alternatives:
 * http://hyperpolyglot.org/lightweight-markup (comparison table)

See Wikipedia for more (no need to duplicate Wikipedia thoroughness here)
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_markup_language